QUOTE : Difficulty is not, of course, a reason to reject or ignore a poem. Especially in reading the poetry of the twentieth century, one often willingly assents to Allen Tate’s statement that “poetry . . . demands both in its writing and in its reading all the intellectual power that we have.” There is a distinction, however, between the difficulty of obscurity and the difficulty of complexity. The latter emerges naturally from any attempt to capture a new feeling or idea for poetry. But with Graham, as with so many self-consciously modernist poets, the difficulty seems to fall into the first category. Her poems are obscure because they seem unfinished, because they reside in the privacy of the poet’s mind and not in the public realm where poet and reader discuss things in common. As long as Graham asks the reader to fill in her blanks and solve for her x’s, she has not realized poetry’s greatest and most enduring possibilities.