Academic poetry is intelligent but dull; non-academic poetry is dopey but exciting. Fair or not, that's been the rule of thumb for at least half a century, and generally speaking it's suited everyone just fine. For one thing, thinking of poetry in this way gives us a set of ready-made criteria for judgment; for another, it allows us, depending on whether we secretly worry that we're not that smart or not that interesting, to align ourselves with whichever camp can best disguise our concern. Unfortunately, however, our neat academic/nonacademic arrangement begins to wobble alarmingly as soon as we recall that poems are, after all, written by people, and that nowadays, the people who used to be outside the academy (like women and African-Americans) are frequently inside, and the people who used to be inside (like white men) are sometimes outside (like Dana Gioia), and other times inside (like Billy Collins and Charles Bernstein). All of which raises an interesting question: are our ideas about academic poetry a function of where the poems are written, or of who's doing the writing?

Susan Stewart's fourth collection, Columbarium, puts this issue front and center, because let's face it, any book that name checks Merleau-Ponty, Empedocles, Virgil, Rilke, Augustine of Hippo, Euripides ("trans. Susan Stewart"), Kant, the OED, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Plato, and the eighteenthcentury poet James Thomson is bound to make readers think the author has put together a syllabus or two. (Stewart is a professor at Penn.) On top of this, Columbarium has the kind of structure that would have given Allen Tate a rosy glow— the book begins and ends with invocations to the elements (complete with portentous titles like, "Wrought from the Generation of EARTH"), and in between it offers the reader not torrid first-person confessionals, not precious postmodern collages, but . . . georgics. Yes, georgics—the agrarian, didactic poems that were perfected in Latin by Virgil, rehabilitated in English by James Thomson, and then more or less ignored by everybody except for classics departments and the occasional comp lit grad student. This isn't just a scholar's book; it's a scholar's scholar's book.

It's also, in many ways, a very good book. Stewart is a fluid lyricist with an excellent ear, a good sense of pacing, and a gift for making abstract language seem rooted and real. The book's showcase is its eighty-page central section, which loosely follows an abecedarian pattern, one poem to a letter. Stewart takes a remote, teacherly tone in these "shadow georgics" (as she calls them), and she aims for the crisp twist of intellectual revelation even when describing things that are domestic and intimate. The act of braiding hair, for example, inspires commentary like, "All the effort / to save in itself / a form of loss," and "hope itself apparent / there in the very // notion a made thing can last." Stewart also loves structural hijinks: in a forty-page span, we get shaped verse ("Jump"), a set of common measure-ish quatrains arranged like haiku ("Night Songs"), a mirror poem ("Two Brief Visions of Hell"), and a poem called "Cross/X," in which a section is, yes, crossed out.

Stewart's great achievement here is to keep this relentlessly cerebral project from looking like the world's most elaborate book report. The strongest poems in Columbarium succeed by being personally impersonal: they have a visceral force that doesn't depend on citation either to Stewart's experience or the reader's own, that reaches back instead to an emotional code seemingly written into the language itself. Here is all of "O":

Toi, toi, toi, said Peleus.
Grieving, Hecuba
barked like a dog.
O said the woman
who spoke only English,
who cast an English
zero out, a wreath
on the battering waves.
O the teeth clenched.
O a fistful of hair.

This is the best kind of academic writing, effortlessly linking past and present while simultaneously knitting a complex metaphor (an O is a zero is a wreath) into a handful of lines. Most important, though, is the way in which Stewart man- ages to convey a sense of risk that is no less energizing for being detached from the everyday world of hot dogs and bicycles and divorces. Take the grim surreality of one of her "Night Songs": "Raisins, almonds, little lambs, / fox has gone ahunting / butterflies pecking eyes— / sleep before the haunting."

As strong as Columbarium is, however, Stewart does occasionally lapse into the sort of noodling that has sapped academic poetry from Eliot to Anne Carson. The problem with bad academic writing is that, despite its usual pose of archedeyebrow sophistication, it's at heart excruciatingly naïve. Consider this passage from "Wrought from the Generation of EARTH":

Deep where the bloodless ghosts assemble, at the still
  base of the revolving world,
the girl sorted seeds in the lap of her apron, letting each
  one count as a month, letting three count
as a season, saying six will count as the darkness and six
  will count as the light.

And Frodo shall bear the Ring unto the Fire. If most fantasy writers long for a world stripped of the ambiguities of modern life, most poets long for a language untroubled by the hiccups of contemporary English. In bad academic poetry, this longing—this misplaced nostalgia—is detached from its poignant human context and either buried beneath the whithers and wherefores of a leaden High Style (represented here by mytho-babble about "bloodless ghosts") or swaddled in amateur philosophy. Or both. Implicit in this selfconsciously dramatic approach is a desire to believe in a great and glorious thing known as "poetry" (and by extension, great and glorious things known as "poets"), instead of in plain old poems that anybody can read. Should we, then, necessarily be surprised that the poets who once took their cues from Eliot and Pound have been replaced by poets who take their cues from Gertrude Stein and Gilles Deleuze? What a collection like Columbarium reveals, in both its considerable virtues and its occasional shortcomings, is that new books may line the shelves of the academy, and new faces may decorate its faculty lounges, but those ivy-covered walls themselves have a way of holding the same old things together—and of keeping the same new things out.

— David Orr