Once upon a time, there was a poetry entrepreneur-cum-antholo-gist named Oscar Williams who was the maker and breaker of the budding careers of young poets by dint of his powers to include or exclude them from his Little Treasury series of American or Modern Poetry collections. To be included was to be noticed by the major book publishers and in due course to find one's way to a published volume of one's own. To be denied that recognition was bad enough, but to be "dropped," to have Oscar's Oscar contemptuously taken away, was like being consigned to a special poetic oblivion. This terrible fate befell the brilliantly gifted George Starbuck, whose bravura technique probably has no match among English-language poets of this century.

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