To convey a sense of the quality of Edward Brathwaite's poetry is difficult. Let me suggest a distinction between poetry that is moving and poetry that is stirring…. H. D.'s poems are the former kind; Brathwaite's are the latter. I don't mean like a Sousa march either, though I've no objection to Sousa. It is a question of vigor and a certain fibrous resiliency. Brathwaite, who is the foremost poet of the English-speaking Caribbean and at least in some sense a revolutionary, is never shrill, is always keen to the pathos of his people's plight, yet the basic exuberance of his feeling cannot be doubted. In part it is revolutionary optimism, in part a closeness to his sources in folk culture. Brathwaite has said that the chief literary influence on his work has been the poetry of T. S. Eliot, but if this is so it has been an influence almost entirely limited to matters of organization and structure, and perhaps to Eliot's manner of rhyming, though this could have come from anywhere. In texture, in verbal technique, in almost everything, nothing could be further from Eliot's poetry than Brathwaite's. Brathwaite has made his reputation on three long poems, Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969). Now they have been published in one volume, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, and it is a book everyone should read. Brathwaite uses many voices, ranging from standard English to dialects of several kinds, and in many rhythms, from subdued free cadence to calypso. Not all passages are equally successful; sometimes his jazz tempos remind us too much of Lindsay's "Congo" or his dialect slips too far toward the type of Auden's ballads. But in general he has been remarkably successful in reproducing black speech patterns, both African and Caribbean, in English syntax, using the standard techniques of contemporary poetry, and he has been equally successful in suggesting to an international audience the cultural identities and attitudes of his own people. To my mind his best writing is in Masks, a poem which explores the poet's longing to discover his own roots in the culture and history of the Ashanti Federation, written as a consequence of his living and working in Ghana for a number of years. In the end his seeking was, and had to be, a failure, as he acknowledges, but it produced magnificent poetry…. (pp. 317-18)

[There] is no way to suggest in a small space the density, variety, wisdom, and fervor of Brathwaite's poems…. [He] is a poet of real accomplishment by any standards, to whom we must give not only our attention but our admiration. (p. 320)