The Word Pavilion: New and Selected Poems

Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer Prize winner and former director of the literary section of National Endowment for the Arts, has stated, "I believe Middleton is the finest living poet writing in English. If this were a just world, he would have the Nobel Prize." Others write: "Middleton is a poet for whom there is a profound connection between natural and imaginative creativity, nature and mind," and that "he apprehends seeing and imagining differently as an act which has political implications, and opposes all forms of tyranny . . . He is a poet who celebrates primal energy, but as a sea to navigate, not a savage or wild element to let loose imaginatively in deranged behavior or murderous exercises of power. He is also a playful and witty poet, who has fun at the expense of academic prose style and logic, and enjoys 'absurd' writing which upsets habits of categorizing and class-ifying or authoritarian ideas of order or literary decorum."