The Returns

Alfred Corn is a national resource, a bard of astonishing breadth. -Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Alfred Corn is one of our finest living poets....Best of all, despite the largeness of his expec-tations, Corn is no softie. He eschews sentimentality. He is humorous, observant, quick to see awkward details, human failings, ironic mishaps. -Grace Schulman, The Nation

Alfred Corn has enormous resources at work in his poems: wit, strength, sureness of touch. The poems interweave the strands of a world touchingly recollected, and of a world jubilantly imagined. -Anthony Hecht

Alfred Corn's poems are exquisite, formal. They show a rare breadth of experience, observation and perception. -Jane Henderson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

I know of nothing else of such ambition and realized power in Corn's own generation of American poets. He has had the skill and courage to confront, absorb, and renew our poetic tradition at its most vital. -Harold Bloom

Few poets of our time have drawn upon the wisdom of experience with such unaffected honesty and tactful skill. If Corn continues to write verse of such resonance, he will be a very important American poet indeed; as it is, at the age of 37, he stands at the forefront of his generation. -Robert Shaw, The Nation

Whether writing in free verse or magically weaving in strict rhyme patterns, Corn combines memory and imagination into long, meditative poems that digress but never lose our interest. -Rochelle Ratner, Library Journal

What gives Corn's work its force is that its elegance and control is never an end in itself. His poetry is for poetry's sake, no doubt, but it is more urgently concerned with life. -Matthew Gilbert, Boston Review

[Alfred Corn] understands art to be "always more than technical virtuosity," his poetry never merely displays his considerable poetic skills, but rather becomes a mode of thought, an inquiry into art and passion, the limits of mastery, mortality, divinity, and the possible destiny of the human soul. -Carolyn Forche