"Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" (1924), Ransom's best-known poem, is also one of his best, one that Randal Jarrell has called "perfectly realized . . . and almost perfect." Like many of Ransom's other poems, this one is on the precariousness of human life, the fleetingness of feminine beauty. It demonstrates a quality of Ransom's artistry that Graham Hough has noted: the poet's ability to present important problems through delicate subject matter.

Far from being a simple pessimist, however, Ransom has the positive intention of making the reader face up to the sobering facts of existence without having recourse to the kind of consolation traditionally offered by religious belief. It is especially significant in this regard that his many poems on death have a somewhat different background than might appear at first. All of them are motivated by a philosophic purpose that he had entertained certainly when composing Poems About God and probably long before that.

This loss of faith and certainty, conveyed paradoxically in decorous and charming linguistic and poetic forms usually associated with the poetry of chivalry and romance and treated with a wit that verges on black comedy, becomes the model for other Ransom poems. In "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," he once again dramatizes the enigmatic and shifting nature of existence. The speaker, a neighbor of the Whitesides, is reflecting on the totally unexpected death of John Whiteside's daughter.

… When Merrill uses an idiom, he turns it over curiously. So, for example, the dead metaphor "On the rocks" springs unexpectedly to life. …

[Kalstone quotes the section beginning "When my parents were younger" and that ends "on the rocks."]

… ["Lost in Translation"] begins with the apparently random way things happen to us and it includes a number of episodes not explicitly related. … The poem weaves connections between the world of the child, vividly recalled in the present tense, and that of the remembering adult, who only makes his full entrance in the past tenses of the long rhapsodic coda. (Even a more recent episode – a mind-reader in London – is told as if the child were perceiving it: "This grown man reenters, wearing grey.") An odd massing of consciousness takes place.

{Yenser’s extended survey of "Lost in Translation" focuses on numerous passages and discusses them in detail. In this, he is centered on Merrill’s description of the page in the jigsaw puzzle.] … Mademoiselle perhaps thinks the boy is the veiled woman’s son, and if so she might be swayed by her own maternal feelings or by her keen awareness of her employers’ domestic plight.

"Lost in Translation" calls into play three autobiographical situations. In the most recent one, which the poem outlines last, the setting is Athens, where Merrill had his second home, on Athinaion Efivon Street at the foot of Mount Lykabettos, from 1959 until the late 1970s, and the subject is his rereading of Valery's magnificent lyric, "Palme," and his subsequent search through the city's libraries for Rilke's translation of that poem into German. Merrill half-recalls having seen the translation years earlier, but when he cannot turn up a copy, he wonders whether he hasn't imagined it.

Symbolism turns on an ambiguity between literal and metaphoric, or if ambiguity is too strong a word, on an extension and elaboration of metaphor to the point where it threatens to gain priority over the objects it modifies. … Merrill does not often push to the boundaries of metaphor … but often enough a simple construct of likeness exfoliates into a richly imagined (or described) scene of its own, moving far from its metaphorical function. …

[Shetley cites the lines that begin "Soon, of these May mornings" and end "into a crazing texture."]

Unlike E.P. Thompson, I would like to fasten Thomas McGrath’s "Against the False Magicians" down into a local context. Thompson suggests we read the poem in the context of "Communist cultural circles to illuminate an internal hullabaloo in which McGrath was rejecting both of the barren alternatives, ‘socialist romanticism’ or ‘socialist realism,’ which were being debated." Never a strict party-liner, McGrath’s resistance to the sometimes overly orthodox aesthetic prescriptions of the left no doubt influences, as Thompson argues, both "Magicians" and his poetics.

What makes Thomas McGrath’s "Crash Report" so immediately intriguing is the decidedly anti-populist—for this famously populist poet—last stanza. McGrath challenges his readers to "examine a case on record," to make sense of the apparent contradiction between calling two grossly unequal deaths—one "real" (going "down over Paramashiru"), the other "phony" (the result of "joy-riding"—equally heroic.