As a young man in rural Wales in the 40's, Richard Jones says that he experienced art as "simple communication." Poetry was as commonplace a part of life as the sermon in Puritan Massachusetts. When the man next door wrote a new volume, everyone had it on his table. Jones knew several examples of the type which has proliferated so many parodies in our own time: the Welsh poet who stalked the hillsides in a raincoat, composing while he walked. If someone praised a rival while he was sitting in the kitchen with friends, he withdrew his latest work from inside his coat and declaimed it, accompanying himself with bardic gestures.

It is hard to find any contemporary analogy to the world that tutored Jones in his ideas about culture and his expectations as a writer. In the Wales of his youth, he came to regard art "as an intense conversation among friends overheard by the world." What this meant for him was literally listening to people who'd known each other for a long time, who had always been in and out of his family's house, who cared deeply but naturally about poetry as a form of human expression. Our approximate equivalent is watching Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer punch each other out on TV. Commercial publishing creates an artificial world of letters, ruled by movie stars and sustained by an amazing machinery of distribution. But the people who share the best seller list do not share the same human circumstances; nor do the authors who share critical acclaim have more in common than that their books are reviewed in the same magazine. Jones, for instance, has had a lot to say in his work about the influence