Peter Porter might be described, unkindly, as another, younger, quirkier, brighter Betjeman. Certainly his verse is marred by the same jocose, inapposite cleverness…. He is not always … offensive [in Preaching to the Converted], he is often merely glib, and fancy: "I've never been on Ulysses' island / or on Isherwood's"; "God is a Super-Director / who's terribly good at crowd scenes, / but He has only one tense, the present." I take it there is a strategy here, rather than simple recklessness: hard, brittle jokes are an oblique (very oblique) mark of your sensibility. Of course, an open, sentimental concern for the issues of our time can look very fraudulent, and Porter nattily defends the old Poetry against the earnestness of the young…. But if you're defending the small, civilized life against the hordes of youth and socialism, if your line is the quiet human notations which make poetry precious under any historical conditions, you need to be rather more convincingly human yourself than Porter (or Betjeman) manages to be, you need to make civilization sound less like a club for you and your witty friends.

Porter's versions of Martial, apart from one or two over-cute anachronisms, come off very well, present a better picture of the poet Porter seems to want to be: urbane, ironic, funny, full of wisdom and common sense. "If I can't be famous till I'm dead," Porter has Martial say, "I'm in no great hurry to be read."… But it would be unfair to leave Porter with this vicarious achievement. Every now and then one of his own poems will break through the brittleness into a very sharp, curious intensity, and [for example, his] vision of Hardy in London is tactful and subdued…. (pp. 46-7)