The public and private passions of a poet

Collected Poems, By C.K. Williams, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 704 pp., $40

In an age when writing that isn't downright naive tends to have been plunged in the acid bath of irony, the poet C.K. Williams remains a provocative exception. Throughout the five decades represented in his new "Collected Poems," Williams has maintained the most sincere, and largest, ambitions. Like Yeats and Lowell before him, he writes from the borderland between private and public life.

There are surely poetry readers to whom such a grand endeavor will seem overwrought or old-fashioned. But that's as much dissent as you're going to get in this review. Williams seems to me to fulfill, triumphantly, the big demands he places on himself. Reading his poems, you sense their considerable formal beauty, yet you also hear something more: a voice that has become a representative consciousness.

Williams's commitment to intertwining public and private realities shows up early, in the jagged poems of his first two books, "Lies" (1969) and "I Am the Bitter Name" (1972) . The predominant emotion is anger. Set against the poet's inner phantasmagoria are the infuriating facts of the Vietnam War and the Nixon era.

These poems move at a whiplash pace. With little or no punctuation, they burst and frazzle down the page. They tend to read as if they were written by a man who's just stuck his finger in an electrical outlet.

The publication in 1977 of Williams's third book, "With Ignorance," marks a genuine breakthrough. The newer poems exhibit all the propulsive force and transgressive bite of the earlier work, but they now register the social world with greater realism and tonal resourcefulness. Williams starts to show a finely tuned ear for how his contemporaries actually speak. With his characteristic long lines, he'll begin a poem like this: "I think most people are relieved the first time they actually know someone who goes crazy."

The colloquial directness of that statement, and the insinuation that nags beneath it, suggest how social life doesn't dampen, but captures and conducts, the heat of Williams's obsessions. He's able in these poems to intrude on the territory of the novelist and the essayist, and yet to maintain the compressed power and the formal beauty of lyric.

Such a dual style stands out in the narrative poems of his 1983 collection, "Tar." Again and again this book asks the reader to examine his or her place in history, a difficult task in a culture that often seems to erase its own history.

Despite his narrative immediacy, Williams can also strike a more philosophical tone, a tone of speculative yearning. The combination of corporeal rawness and metaphysical fluency stands out in two successive book titles from the late 1980s and early '90s, "Flesh and Blood" and "A Dream of Mind."

Although Williams's consistency hasn't lagged, his style has changed in the last decade. He's begun to write many of his poems in shorter lines. These poems have a new subtlety. "Scale," for example, from the 2003 collection "The Singing," is an elegant and gorgeous love poem. Many of the newest poems in the collection take their titles from the names of animals, and they show an impressive ability to dwell in the world of creaturely detail.

Yet Williams has, if anything, become an even more impassioned poet of political life. Although they don't swell into mere rants, or read like sermons delivered to the choir, his poems about the war in Iraq singe with their formal and emotional heat. One of them, "War" from "The Singing," also reveals a bedrock conviction, for all its aggrieved sadness: the belief that there is a "sanctity," a moral order beyond our relative measurements.

It's that ethical dedication that saves Williams's poems of political outrage and grief from mere luxuriant despair, and suffuses and strengthens his whole body of work. As the poet's sentences circle and plunge across his lines like plaited sinews, they join skeptical intelligence and emotional sincerity, in a way that dignifies all of our attempts to make sense of the world and of ourselves. C. K. Williams has set a new standard for American poetry.

Peter Campion is the author of a collection of poems, " Other People " (University of Chicago). He teaches at Washington College in Maryland.