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Oops!! Sorry folks (and especially Candice and Michael) -- I can see now that my original post was ambiguous. I quoted the first two stanzas of the Gioia poem, and then [without making this sufficiently clear] a later stanza where the Auden "borrowing" was most obvious: " And behind the whole poem, the ghost of Auden. In fact, I'm tempted to say the poem is a bad pastiche of Auden. "No jumble box of imagery" (Gioia) -- "Jumbled in a common box" (Auden). If I want to read Auden, I'll read Auden, not Auden-and-water. The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale. " In fact, going back to Gioia's "The Next Poem", I see I managed to introduce yet +another+ confusion by missing out the stanza where Goioa jumbles Auden!! (I think I was trying to avoid quoting so that much I'd be violating copyright.) Thus (Gioia): The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale. No jumble box of imagery dumped glumly in the reader's lap or elegantly packaged junk the unsuspecting must unwrap. Apologies. Robin > Well, it now appears that there was only one poem (by Goioa) all along! I > don't know how many people besides Michael and myself misread Robin's post > as comparing two stanzas of "The Next Poem" to a stanza by Auden, but that > 3d "detail" stanza is in fact Gioia's as well.