Chicago Review 44/3&4, 1998: "a vividly intelligent portrait of...coming to terms...in gratitude and the spirit of forgiveness....a continuously surprising memoir...also a sustained meditation on poetry....His Zen way...seeks enlightenment, achieved by a discipline of bringing to mind what the mind has hidden, both dark and light."

American Poetry Review, 23/1, January/February 1994, 36-37: "The poem gets, in its wonderful Williams-like slippages, the odd vagary of meditation -- wandering over trivial learning and a lifetime's forgotten experience -- as many more committed poets have not. But it gets, too, the fundamental insight: that it takes 'dar[ing]' -- but brings immense restoration -- to...simply be where we are....Whether the issue is the role of linguistic error in early childhood memories, New Historicist misgivings about the ethics of Spenser and Shakespeare, or the value of sexual liberationism, Scott has a charming way of moving through both sides of any argument....No book in recent memory is more venturesome in its intellectual voyages than this one, yet one of its most attractive qualities is its dogged humanism."

Harvard Review (Winter 1993), 1-3: "While Scott resists the Eliotic attempt to extinguish personality in order to tell the story of the culture as a whole, he also chooses to write a poetry which is distinct from the work of Frank O'Hara or the very late notebook poetry of Robert Lowell....The wisdom that Scott achieves in this poem, and that he embodies in its flexible, inclusive structure, is that we must search for a way between what he calls the 'brutality' of civilization and the mindless anarchy that he says will soon lead to brutality; the way is achieved in the act of making, as Scott advocates....The poet's attempt to 'comprehend' rather than to 'impose' order -- his openness to patterns that happen to exist -- is a feature of the poem's effortless style. Scott presents to readers a way toward the making of a less aggressive (which is to say, contemporary) form of modern poetry."

American Book Review, December 1993-January 1994, 25-27: "There is nothing quite like these books, despite their acknowledged heritage in the tradition of the personal epic....It is in their intentions and in their sense of form and language that these works are most original....Scott's trilogy, only two thirds completed as yet, is certain to be one of the most remarkable and challenging works of our time."

Beloit Poetry Journal, Spring 1993, 36-39: "To me this appears as a major Romantic poem for our era: a "Prelude," evaluating the century in terms of the growth of the poet's mind: like Byron and Shelley, profoundly engaged in the political and social evils of the age; like all Romantics, concerned...with Becoming, Time, Change, and Many."