Lea Baechler, A. Litz, & Leonard Unger, American Writers: a collection of Literary Biographies, Scribner, 1991, p. 548.

Estranging, since the speaker’s self is presented only via the multiple figures of the caddis fly and the apostle Saul/ Paul – each of which is subject to metamorphosis. Like the fly and the convert, the poet may be condemned (by a force somewhere between biological and spiritual necessity) to exist in a stade of betweenness, waterborne yet in flight, a convert Roman preaching to Greeks, an uneasy foreigner who like metaphor or poetic language itself, keeps crossing the borderline of his own otherness, «  Always alike and unlike. »