Taken from throughout Mills's career, the essays collected in this
volume delve into the work of such influential writers as Wallace
Stevens, Denise Levertov, Samuel Beckett, Galway Kinnell, Edith Sitwell,
Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, Isabella Gardener, James
Wright, David Ignatow, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, and
Stanley Kunitz. Mills examines how the personal element informs the
works of these writers and enables them to speak to us, without
impediment, from the deep center of a personal engagement with
existence.