The book’s final essay discusses Wiman's diagnosis of macroglobulinemia, a rare cancer,[8] and a clear-eyed declaration of what it means — for an artist and a person — to have faith in the face of death."
On the topic of form, Wiman wrote in an essay called “An Idea of Order”: Many poets and critics now almost automatically distrust any work that exhibits formal coherence, stylistic finish, and closure.
At other times, and probably more damagingly, they either subtly devalue or patronize the work in question, praising the craftsmanship of the poems in such terms as make it clear that this is not ‘important’ poetry.
Of his own taste, Wiman writes in Ambition and Survival "more and more what I want from the poetry I read is some density of experience, some sense that a whole life is being brought to bear both on and in language".
Omar Sabbagh compares Wiman to Simone Weil and Jürgen Moltmann saying "Whether we call it 'affliction', 'the void', or what have you, these Christian thinkers were eminently modernist in seeing God, not as necessity, but as 'contingency'.