With stunningly precise formal, biographical, and cultural analysis, Laurence Lieberman turns his critical eye to American poets and confirms his prodigious talent not only as a narrative poet, but as a critic and essayist as well. What Lieberman aspires to do in Beyond the Muse of Memory, a collection of new and previously published essays, is to send the reader back to major poets for a fresh look and to neglected artists for close study. Lieberman's new studies of Robert Lowell illuminate the poems of Lowell's final period, "a sector of his work that has been wrongly undervalued by many of his critics." Other essays that have never before appeared in book form on James Dickey, Robert Penn Warren, and Stephen Berg are gathered here with Lieberman's best and best-known earlier essays on W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, Derek Walcott, James Wright, and William Stafford, to name a few.