William Bronk has an allegorical mode and a symbolic mode. The allegorical mode starts with an analogy and draws a conclusion. Something like "We suited up for the baseball game / and kept score until it was over. / We kept records of the scores in books / and even cared years later who had won and lost. / In the end, losers and winners were the same. It won." (My invented example.) The symbolic mode begins with a specific insight, a luminous flash. Romantic theory would tell us to prefer the symbolic to the allegorical, and indeed I do prefer Bronk's symbolic poems to his allegories, where often it is too obvious from the onset that the baseball game (or whatever) is unimportant. Can this distinction be maintained? A third mode might be the purely abstract poem, in which there is neither symbol nor allegory per se.

I began to read Bronk seriously in the late 1980s and continued to buy all of his books until his fairly recent death. I still return to him from time to time.