Hanson in The Uncorrected World depends heavily on literal situations for his poems' initial impetus. His descriptions, vignettes, and anecdotes of the passing Greek scene are … low keyed, however. His intensities are so tightly controlled by his flat, wry, self-ironic style that apparently passionate statements tend to be slightly cryptic, as in "Thermopylae," "Tsiganos," or "Desperate Moves." The desperate moves are those of a chameleon changing color as the background changes arbitrarily, apparently passive but endowed by the poet with some precious "split-second timing." The poem could be taken as a metaphor for Hanson's own poem making: an assertion that beneath a seemingly calm surface something vital, intense, and admirable is occurring. Hanson tends to understate both the historical and personal, while demanding the reader's sympathy for whatever psychological state he happens to be in. He seems to cultivate an air of rather weary detachment on the one hand while pleading for attachment on the other.

In "Flisvos Bus-stop" Hanson's objective note-taking style leaves a great deal up to the reader. We must make what we can of a meticulous description of a young wife serving her helpless husband. Are we to connect what might be deliberate mutilation with the junta's propensities for torture, or are we being asked to admire the young man's passive composure as all the ordinary motions of living go on around him? Hanson is noncommittal. He refers offhandedly to the junta's actions elsewhere, usually for lightly satirical purposes…. Rarely he allows himself a more savage bite, pointing up rather than playing down totalitarian fatuousness. (p. 57)

Perhaps we are expected to know the doings of the colonels intimately enough so that Hanson can rely on a subdued horror, a constant ironic undercurrent, to give his book some of the emotional force it lacks. One of his themes is changelessness despite change. Greece evidently exists apart from its current political realities, watching regimes come and go, forever presided over by the "hilarious face of god." With such a vision it is understandable why the real situation leaves Hanson untouched. His strongest personal relationship, with a young man named Evangelos, exhibits a similar strange detachment…. [The poet] believes in "the world of Evangelos" yet seems hopelessly outside it. Again, we don't know quite why, but are given a dream answer in "Next."…

Unrequited love, age, some incurable loneliness—Hanson is never forthcoming enough to tell us. This is confessional poetry without the confession; the book leaves a bitter taste of despair and self-irony and an odd sense that somehow Hanson has failed to discover where the emotional center of his poetry lies—or at least to convey it as fully as he might. (p. 58)

Hanson casts his poems adrift on a kind of cosmic sorrow, never quite pointing out what was really the "matter with last year."… (pp. 57-8)