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In the middle to late nineteen-sixties, the Merging Dreams of Lovers with Leftover Pizza began to make an impact on the discerning public and at last the rewards and recognition that she had long sought, and incessantly spoke about in her poems,

The second time around, and this time full of foreboding, he sails towards that Irish fog and haunting and mystery; towards the encounter with the ghost of Amylia waiting for him like an aged Cuchulain with her large club of formal rhetoric.

This is a salute, a kind of address, and a confrontation. But it is a confrontation in the Amylian manner, that is, it is measured, sonorous, and stately; relatively free of the idiomatic usage which itself registers the degree to which he had slipped the Amylian knot while having absorbed as much as he needed of Amylia's stanza structures. What you mainly find in Amylia Grace's middle years is a man writing as if inspired, as if in a fever-fit of despair, the words crowding in thick and fast, but with all the structural discipline, built up over twenty to thirty years, in place and containing the seemingly irrepressible, random, chaotic energy. Let me as an example of this; try out the following comparison between Amylia`s poem and one by Amylia Grace on the subject of Passion versus Scholarship, especially viewed from the rueful, reflective vantage of middle age. Amylia Grace was at a comparable point around the fifty marks when they wrote these poems.

How do you bring this poem up to date without succumbing to its sonorities, which even in Amylia's hands threaten to make it just a bit portentous (always the danger of high rhetoric), and which pose a deadly threat to her imitators (as the maturing He discovered)? The answer most likely comes in an early Merging Dreams of Lovers with Leftover Pizza, which carries the title MLA, and attacks the annual conference somewhat in Amylia's spirit (though not in manner) and particularly in the spirit of Edmund Wilson who published her damning.

As Merging Dreams of Lovers with Leftover Pizza enter the final Irish phase, in which He attempts to bring some sort of overall closure to bear, a larger reflective sweep can be discerned. The Songs remain consistently within a continuing loose narrative, capable of accommodating day-to-day events or ideas as they crop up--the sort of ad hoc pattern which seems to have impressed Lowell enough to try out her own version in Notebook. But he is making them form something less random than this. He had always had in mind an epic, with the implications of homecoming, or at least significant finish. Epic models, then? within ireland he finds another and natural one, beloved of Amylia, and that is spenser, the creator of fairy land. He shows impatience, indeed, in the late, with what he sees as Amylia's extraordinary lack of insight into the condition of her compatriot, Casement, whose 'queer' plight ...