A pseudonym, though it obscures, is not always successful as a bid for obscurity. Witness Elena Ferrante: while her work stands on its own, the added mystery of authorial absence has no doubt contributed to the years-long international firestorm of publicity and speculation.

Nevertheless, a pen name may still give personal shelter to the author who chooses it.

Daniel Brown is, if his poetry is any indication, a very patient man. “I’m as open as the next guy,” he writes in “The Biggie,” a poem from his latest collection, What More?, “to the counterintuitive.” This he proves again and again, in both openness and unexpectedness. What More? begins with Brown asking an honest question, one so honest that an animating tension is introduced between the candor of the content and the art of its presentation.

After a long career spent in the throes of literary battle, Harold Bloom wants to tell us that he is done fighting.

He began his combat in the mid-fifties by defending the English Romantics against the New Critics who, inspired by T.S. Eliot, maligned Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and others to such an extent that study of them was virtually banned in American universities until Bloom took up the call.

Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter Professor at Harvard University, begins her new book with what she calls an “account of [her] life as a critic” – a reasonable subject for an introduction, given that, at the time this review is published, Vendler will have just passed her 82nd birthday. More relevant, though, is that The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar is the latest of nearly 30 books authored or edited by Vendler since the 1960’s, over the course of which, in addition to hundreds of reviews and essays, she has become known as perhaps the finest living critic of poetry in America.