Trip to Tipton and Other Compulsions, a volume of sixty-eight poems, records the unfolding events from one year of the author's life, capturing special highlights (a trip to Europe with his wife, the celebration of their second wedding anniversary, their mystical visits to Wisconsin and Illinois) as well as daily routines (his first experiences as an outlet-store manager and as a traveling salesman, his journeys to St. Louis and to small Midwestern towns, his home life in Farmington, Missouri), revealing his struggle to incorporate the idealistic, romantic world of the artist into his realistic, pragmatic existence as a young, newly married businessman, left wondering if life is more than "the sum of seasons leaving and arrived."