John Updike balances upon, and in numerous modes characterizes, the center of the beam in American literature. While maintaining a highly literary elan and readership, he has organized to bypass the obscurity and ostentation associated with "highbrow" authors...
As a poet, Updike is thought of primarily as a practitioner of Light Verse, a period bestowed as often to abuse as to categorize a poet, catching up in its loose netting a kind of brightly-colored fish: verse de société, parody, epitaph, clerihew, occasional verse, anything unconcerned with love, attractiveness, death, prescribed experimentalism, the stuff (or stuffing as is often the ...