[Wain's] verse way [in "Letters to Five Artists"] is to combine the sonorously slack and portentous tones of late Eliot with the informal chat of Auden and the broken eye-rhythms of W. C. Williams. All on the surface, you see, for easy scanning. Not exactly a pastiche though; a synthesis, rather, of what these poets have left for the serious poet writing in England today: a means of talking intelligently about what matters—the fate of the single spirit in this world….

[Exile among Barbarians] is the general theme of the book; the great poet whose works were all youth and love, the flesh, and was forced to live out his days in a bitter, rude place by imperial edict, and who came to see our lives' essence in the flow of water, water which changes like our lives. By singling out five artist friends and thinking of them Wain puts together a world for himself, enough of a world at any rate to live by, invisible and evanescent as it may be….

It is a unified vision, if a sad one. The only trouble is that the book as a whole lacks force and attractive energy. I fail to find much trace of the unseen field of force that a thinking mind leaves in its wake: poetry, in short. Instead, there is a general feeling that, yes, the poet knows what he wants to say, and can't say it in prose because prose would sound pretentious (like so many of our "philosophers" and pundits and gurus from sociology and "psychology").

And I suspect that what he has to say to his friends (and to us) is simple: that there is not much to go on with, but that you must be praised because you do after all go on, even making something from it … because you are creators, loving and suffering and joying in work. But Wain's speech in poetry is ponderous, too, laudatory, elegiac, philosophical and so on. But not, unfortunately, anywhere very interesting.