The blurb to Mr. Fuller's Collected Poems—an unusually platitudinous one—implies that he is, above all, a continually developing poet. This is seriously misleading, for it neatly misses the point: he is, in the proper sense, an occasional poet—the most worthy of his time. What may have seemed like a consistent poetic development to the blurb-writer is in reality a record of the changing attitudes of a remarkably sensitive and good-hearted man. (Some modern exponents of verse would deny that good-heartedness has anything to do with poetry—they have to; but it does, and it is one of Mr. Fuller's strongest assets.) Genuinely readable and unpretentious though he is, Mr. Fuller's use of language has not undergone that change which alone can justify the word "developing": diction, texture, rhythm, tone—all these have remained more or less constant throughout his twenty-five years' work. He does many effective things to words; they seldom do anything to him. In fact, when he is "carried away" he is at his weakest.

He is a poet of public themes. Even when he is writing of himself—of his reactions to the seasons, war, sex, or metropolitan awfulness—he carefully represents himself as the civilised creature in its public, primitive, or natural environment. (p. 72)

Mr. Fuller's Collected Poems represents a real achievement. This is put into bold relief by the verse of those who imitate him or try to borrow his acrid, amiable tone of voice. One of the purely incidental values of this book is that it cruelly shows up the work of a new wave of poetasters: the authors of those "intelligible" verses, written in accordance with "rules," that make neat, small points. Such authors are using verse-making as a means to an end.

One values Mr. Fuller because his poems are so obviously prompted by different, less ambitious, less trivial needs. His readability does not arise from any easily acquired slickness, but from seriousness and true awareness.

Mr. Fuller expresses his position most clearly in the Horatian Translation…. Here Mr. Fuller is at his best: humorous, honest, and authoritative. It is the poetry of the civilised attitude rather than of passion; but its strength is derived from a decency, unsentimental concern, and intellectual self-effacement not to be found in the culture-marionettes who ape its urbane tone, but who lack the qualities of character that are required to achieve it.

Mr. Fuller retained his early Marxism until relatively late, and in the poems of his middle period this sometimes takes on a specious appearance…. But there are fewer signs of this in his latest poems, notably the Faustian Sketches and in the twenty-one fine Meredithian Sonnets that close the book. Here, one feels, Mr. Fuller is less certain of the full implications of his themes; and although his increasing and salutary awareness of the unknown has not yet got into his language, it has got into his themes, which are often complex—even recondite. One of the Sonnets (XVI) gives a clue…. The detail of this poem suffers from most of Mr. Fuller's linguistic weaknesses—over-use of "effect" adjectives to fill up a line, forced rhymes (such as "bare")—but here at last is a hint of a personal predicament, a private situation. It has been skilfully dramatised by the novelist-element in the poet, but this device only serves to communicate it more powerfully and disturbingly.

Mr. Fuller's well-deserved success as a novelist may have caused him to experience a new difficulty in writing poems; as this increases his poems may become fewer, but rewarding in an unexpected and perhaps even more valuable way. Meanwhile, this collection demands our respect and admiration. (pp. 73-5)