Books: Prosody Lost

KO, OR A SEASON ON EARTH (115 pp.) —Kenneth Koch—Grove (clothbound $3.50; paperback $1.45).

Unlike long novels, long poems are firmly out of fashion, and in some ways the fact is regrettable. There is an exhilaration, a knowledge of manliness gained by the reader who establishes his base camps on, say, Milton's Paradise Lost, climbs from couloir to crag, and at last reaches the summit. Now Poet Kenneth Koch, an instructor in humanities at Columbia College, has defied the trend by writing a 115-page comic poem, a kind of lesser Catskill among epics, which...

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