What else is experience in the second half of the twentieth century about, but the sense of a world run by people with insane assurance who manipulate large and unmanageable forces over which they have almost no control? "The unsure egoist," Creeley wrote, "is not good for himself " But if he makes us conscious of the process by which ego comes into being, tries to make some purchase on the experience of its emergence, defines exactly what that purchase is and is not, he may be the writer above all worth listening to. It is also not a coincidence that Creeley wrote the poem of the decade about a world gone out of control and the crazy assumption of control that the ego makes:

drive, he sd, for christ's sake, look out where yr going.