Gavin Ewart's verse has sometimes been thought too close to doggerel for comfort, or too facile. These opinions ignore Ewart's poetic temperament. His varieties of comic verse are, like Enright's tones of voice, technical expressions of a seriously presented mischief. Given half a chance—a pension, say—Ewart could be a trouble-maker of the first water. The air of carelessness about his poems is nothing other than cheek, and, indeed, an "air of" rather than "carelessness." In … Be My Guest!, "The Larkin Automatic Car Wash", for instance, imitates the stanza of "The Whitsun Weddings" with as tight a control of colloquial idiom as the original. Ewart, then, can be as metrically tight as he likes; that he doesn't always like is more to the point. He is fond of variety and the inane perspectives created by out-of-place metres like the limerick….

Peculiarly English to the point of rating "charm" as an important poetic effect, Ewart is courageous in his reliance on verse. He is closer to Thomas Hood than any other poet I can think of, and in "The Afterflu Afterlife" he rhymes in the virtuoso manner of the Hood beloved by Auden. Each verse has the same five rhymes. The poem includes the deathless

    We heard the dead word "troth" once in Arbroath

which may well be intended as the most blatant line-for-the-sake-of-a-rhyme in English. But Ewart is that sort of poet—gamey, exploiting what looks inconsiderable for the highly considerable purpose of verbal amusement, some of which is satirical….

But the oddness of Ewart's poems is, in my opinion, more significant than showing an eccentricity for verse. His sonnets, for example, are called "The So-Called Sonnets", while his versions of four of Horace's Odes "were made on the principle that the word-order of the Latin should not on any account be changed." Inventiveness and disregard for what prevails as established definition or propriety are necessary subversions in any society. Ewart's rebellions are enacted through technique, and seem to me to embody a serious disgruntlement at the state of poetry and attitudes towards it. Ewart's chosen ways of writing may amount to a meaning, that any style is insecure, that—with the exception of elegy—an appropriate style is likely to be boring. There is certainly a feeling about his poems that suggests Ewart considers seriousness a wildly overrated expectation which can only lead to social diseases such as piles, pantheism, and under-arm bowling. (p. 78)