Dutiful, accommodating, mild, eager to fit in even when not eager to be generous, Mr. Rosenthal is … rather like a slightly dim war correspondent, sending his copious despatches out of the fury and the mire; and at the end of it all the battle is not much clearer. To make sense of Mr. Rosenthal's book [The New Poets], one has to accept early on (page 7) a sentence which—if one can negotiate the shrill metaphor he has chosen—seems to encapsulate what all his favourite new poets are up to: "If there is, in fact, one distinctively modern quality in literature, it lies in the centrifugal spin toward suicide of the speaking voice." It is evident that this is not the "high-pitched scream" with which Stephen Spender characterized the reaction of the 1930s poets to the events they saw looming up on their horizon, but a histrionic way of isolating and making vivid the phenomenon known as "confessional" poetry. By and large, in fact, Mr. Rosenthal's book is concerned with this kind of poetry.

This means, of course, that Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath bulk large in Mr. Rosenthal's pages,… while Theodore Roethke, oddly enough, is recruited but then dismissed, apparently because he "absorbed so little of the concerns of his age into his nerve-ends": in a way this may be true, but it is hardly a perceptive or just judgment on Roethke's poems. Mr. Rosenthal is a bit of a literalist, and the tone of his strictures against Roethke, who seems in so many ways to be the sort of poet he values, is apparently a reaction against some possibly ill-considered but typically honest and forthright remarks Roethke made here and there in prose. If you are going to have confessional poets, you must put up with their confessions, even when they do not suit your pattern of the confessional.

Mr. Rosenthal's general method is one of extended explication, usually quite decently done, though without much imagination and with a tendency to underline the plodding platitude…. Mr. Rosenthal is … [warm towards] Edwin Brock (remorselessly given as "Bronk" throughout the book, bibliography and index included), enthusiastic about Christopher Middleton, Charles Tomlinson and George MacBeth, dismisses Peter Porter and Anthony Thwaite in one sentence, mentions Elizabeth Jennings so much in passing that one wonders whether he has ever read her, and does not even mention R. S. Thomas, Geoffrey Hill, and Jon Silkin. This leaves room for a lengthy consideration of modern Irish poets, and an epilogue which runs itself into the ground with that stutter of proper names which seems endemic to this sort of roundup. Yes, on reflection,… [this is a] long but only mildly rewarding book.