Robert Francis's Collected Poems 1936-1976 presents us with a career to be admired, to be enjoyed, to be examined with careful respect. Francis is almost infallibly a good poet, at ease with the graces of the iambic line, a clear eye looking at nature, a man quietly stoic, or rejoicing, or loving, or amused. Robert Frost is a strong influence, though Francis has tempered and smoothed some Frostian themes, impishnesses, and ironies. Francis's eye and feelings are sure; his thought, less so. He writes, “I follow Plato with my mind. / Pure beauty strikes me as a little thin.” Then a rudeness tempts me to say that Francis hasn't followed Plato, surely not the Plato of the myth of the mixing fountains in the Philebus. Plato did not know about struggle? Of Francis's “Gloria” I wish to say (and I think Bach, whom he praises in the poem, would agree) no. Neither our praise nor our valuing invents the reality; we, at best, respond.

His poems end more often smoothly than surprisingly; his metrical gracefulness is too often only that. Rare and worth waiting for are such rhythms as, in “Onion Fields,” “until the white / Kerchiefs of the weeding women are whitecaps / And the long red barns boats”; or the second stanza of “Fruit”; or the newly-invented rhythm of “Silent Poem,” which consists entirely of common nouns which are either strong trochees or cretics. Mostly I speak in gratitude for the high number of good poems and the impressive number of extremely good poems, among which I would include “Firewarden on Kearsage,” “Onion Fields,” “The Laughers,” “Museum Vase,” “Fruit,” “Like Ghosts of Eagles,” “Silent Poem,” and three comic masterpieces: “Pitcher,” “Exclusive Blue,” and “On a Theme by Frost.”

The religion of the poems is mostly naturalistic—not scientific naturalism but an acceptance of nature's presence, otherness, beauty, supporting, including death as vanishing or as immanentism, familial love seen as part of and in strong contrast to such a nature. He describes it better than I, in “Valhalla,” one of the best long poems of the century. He describes the view superbly in what may well be his greatest poem, “The Reading of the Psalm.”