Received his Ph.D. from Duke in 1966 and is Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature and Theater Studies. He has taught at UCLA, UC Irvine and Rice. His chief interests lie in American literature, history of poetry, modernism, the aesthetics of reading, and the history and theory of criticism. His major publications include The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens (1968), Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (1975), After the New Criticism (1980), Criticism and Social Change (1983), Ariel and the Police (1988), Critical Terms for Literary Study (1990), Introducing Don DeLillo (1991), New Essays on White Noise (1991), The Edge of Night (1994) Modernist Quartet (1994), Johnny Critelli and The Knifeman (1996), The Music of the Inferno (1999), Lucchesi and The Whale (2001), Close Reading: The Reader (2002), Modernist Lyric in the Culture of Capital (2002), Crimes of Art and Terror (2003) and The Book of Ruth (2005). He was editorial chair of South Atlantic Quarterly for five years.