Poetry. "Cohen's poetry is a kind of highly polished, metaphysical poetry (but firmly rooted in the realities of present-day urban existence). I think his is a unique voice which sounds like nobody else's, except perhaps the quieter lyrical poems of Hart Crane—one of the high points in twentieth-century poetry and a path which, curiously, few poets have chosen to follow. Whether or not Cohen has done so, his poetry hungers after the sublime in the same way Crane's does, without making any concessions to the ancillary graces and seductions of poetic language, yet achieving them almost fortuitously, through his intense concentration on the task at hand—the making of the poem"—John Ashbery.