Poetry is innately related to theft. The lyre was invented, the Greeks tell us, by Hermes, who then gave the instrument to Apollo as compensation for stealing cattle. One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable. Poetry carries us to odd places, almost like the prank, allegedly popular a few years ago, in which somebody steals your garden gnome and sends you postcards of it from points spanning the globe—the Blarney Stone, the Pont-Neuf.

David Ferry, who, at the age of eighty-eight, has just won the National Book Award for poetry, is a special kind of thief. He carries us to places we can’t possibly visit, from the Mesopotamia of Gilgamesh to Horace and Virgil’s Rome. No American poet has translated better the greatest classical authors; Ferry’s translations of Horace are among the predominant texts in contemporary American poetry, teaching American poets (I’m one of them) the Horatian tones—the modesty, civility, and gossip; the swift, fly-by urbanity—that went missing from much of the best American poetry of the seventies and eighties. How strange to have the American vernacular put back in our mouths by this roundabout method. I can remember reading these lines of Horace—of Ferry’s Horace—with amazement at their simple, unprepossessing ecstasy:

Because the muses favor me and love me,

As far as I’m concerned let the wild winds carry

All sadness and trepidation far away. (Odes, I.26)

Ferry’s translations of Virgil are astonishing, and the best of them are Virgil’s Georgics, “the best poem by the best poet,” in Dryden’s estimation. How can anyone achieve such majesty when talking about bees and husbandry? He is now at work on the Aeneid, actuarial tables be damned.

Because Ferry has translated the works of others so well and so prolifically, and because he works comparatively slowly, his original poems risk being overlooked. Twenty-three years passed between the publication of his first book, “On the Way to the Island,” and his second, “Strangers.” He shares with Elizabeth Bishop a humility that is not a quirk of temperament so much as an acknowledgment of the cosmos, which is, after all, much bigger than any poet’s biggest, most barbaric yawp. Ferry’s translation work suggests the massive haystack within which any one poet finds the needle of his original voice. His books are full of marvellous translations, and many of his best poems crest at important points with quotations—long, verbatim quotations—from great authors. “Originality,” for a poet like Ferry, is impossible; where, exactly, are our origins? Language precedes us, literature precedes us, our own emotions and experiences, insofar as literature delivers them, precede us. Ferry’s “That Evening at Dinner,” surely one of the great dinner-party poems in English, ends—or almost does—with a long quotation from Dr. Johnson. The poem is about an old woman’s consciousness of the other guests’ consciousness of her body, made inert and stubborn by a stroke. Ferry’s attention drifts; he notices the “books there on the bookshelves…evenly spaced” and remarks, shockingly, “You could fall between the spaces.” Then the quote:> “In the scale of being, wherever it begins,

or ends, there are chasms infinitely deep;

Infinite vacuities. For surely,

Nothing can so disturb the passion, or

Perplex the intellects of man so much,

As the disruption of this union with

Visible nature, separation from all

That has delighted or engaged him, a change

Not only of the place but of the manner

Of his being, an entrance into a state

Not simply which he knows not, but perhaps

A state he has not faculties to know.”

Ferry’s lineation of the Johnson writes little “chasms” into the quote in the form of line breaks. He finishes with this coda, among the most devastating conclusions to any poem in recent memory:

The dinner was delicious, fresh greens, and reds,

And yellows, produce of the season due,

And fish from the nearby sea; and there were also

Ashes to be eaten, and dirt to drink.

The logic of this sequence is quintessential Ferry, which is to say almost indescribable. The books on the bookshelves are separated by spaces that seem as wide as chasms; the books contain quotations about chasms; we fall into those chasms by reading about them. When the long quotation is over, mortality has been added to the party. It got in, somehow, with the greens and reds and yellows.

“Bewilderment” is Ferry’s new book, the one that got him the big prize. I can’t review it, since he and I are close friends. (I acknowledge him in several of my books.) But I can provide testimony. This is one of the great books of poetry of this young century. That easy traffic between books and real things—the chasms made on the shelf by the books about chasms; the way we turn up and almost spook ourselves in Johnson, or Horace, or Virgil—this shuttle run across representation nowadays seems like the crisscrossing of Charon across the Stygian waters. Ferry, you see, has always been ancient; now he is old. As in the great, late poems of Stevens, the world of these poems is never more than what we make of it, and as the title of the book suggests, what to make of the world is a very hard question indeed. “Lake Water” is a poem about the lake I can see out my office window, Lake Waban; it is also an elegy for Anne Ferry, the brilliant literary critic and Ferry’s late wife. But it’s really about the poem that seeks to ratify them both but keeps turning back into language, language that reality—and this is the subject, I sometimes think, of all poems—always outruns.