Of the twenty-eight poems that appeared in the first collection of Harold Pinter's verse (1968), all but one, “European Revels,” constitute the majority of the poems in his latest collection [Collected Poems & Prose]. These have been added to in subsequent publications in 1978, 1986, 1991, and 1996, bringing the total number to forty-six. Three poems are published for the first time, the most recent one written in January 1995. Each expansion has also included previously published prose pieces: e.g., an elegy composed on the death of Anew McMaster—the last in a tradition of great actor-managers—with whom Pinter played in his early days as an actor.

Two of the often-published poems, “A View of the Party” and “Kullus,” are a temptation to regard his poems merely as experiments leading to his plays. “A View of the Party” is a versified description of the characters in The Birthday Party, and “Kullus” is a poetic sketch about the intruder-displacement theme that is at the basis of so many of Pinter's plots. Still, he has continued to write poetry throughout the years of his stage successes. Both the quantity and quality of a sizable output of poems argues for his writing in that genre in and for itself. Moreover, Pinter wrote poems long before his playwriting days, during his years as an actor. His tribute to those early days is contained in a thin volume of poems which “represent my earliest work.” Ten Early Poems (1992) was released in a limited edition of 500 copies, fifty of which were numbered and signed by the author.

To read the poems chronologically is to sense Pinter's movement toward stylistic economy and overt political statement. The lushness of the earliest poems with their profusion of harsh imagery undergoes a noticeable paring, and the apoliticism of the early work veers to outright political protest in a poem such as “American Football.” Notorious for being refused by a number of publishers because of its obscenities, the poem is vituperative in its expression of Pinter's condemnation of American killings during the Gulf War.

Lyrically bleak in its reference to contemporary atrocities is the final poem, entitled “Poem,” whose line, “The world's about to break,” evokes the mood of Yeats's “Second Coming.” Visceral language—chuck, stuff, chokepit, dark, black, suffocated, kill, scream—leaves little doubt about Pinter's views of contemporary violence. In more polite imagery than either “American Football” or “Poem,” the penultimate poem, “God,” concludes that however he sought “a word to bless / The living throng below,” God discovered only that “he had no blessing to bestow.” On an unusually personal note, there is the love lyric “It Is Here,” written for his wife, Antonia Fraser. Also highly personal, two prose pieces, “Hutton and the Past” and “Arthur Wellard,” are Pinter's prose paeans to cricket, a lifelong passion.

There is little doubt that Pinter will continue to write poems and to rediscover more of his “earliest work.” Frequently described as a poet in the theater, he leaves no doubt that in whatever genre he chooses to write—poetry, prose, or plays—he is instinctively a poet.