Roy Fuller is a man of considerable distinction; he is not a genius. There is no need for me to disparage Mr Fuller, he does the job well enough himself: it is part of his persona as a writer. In his new book From the Joke Shop it produces a few moments of pathos, but nothing more.

This record of ageing, written mostly at night, when thoughts of mortality are supposed to be strong, is preoccupied with death. The prospect of dying comes to Mr Fuller as a shock, the grotesqueness of old age suddenly realised. He is only sixty-three and an operation plus retirement seem to have brought on these morbid thoughts.

But there is something embarrassing about these confessions of inadequacy; even the title disarms. The embarrassment is largely due to the fact that the poems are as awful as he leads us to expect they might be; and the constant note of "I've never been much good anyway, etc." is a receipt for flabbiness and a self-pity which ought to be surprising in a writer whose virtues have always been rightly named as reservation, courtesy and wryness, close observation and a dubious introspection. But the question is: can one write poetry out of such virtues? The answer given by this book is No.

His verse, once the pleasant and thoughtful Augustan companion of a wet afternoon, is now as tired as he says he is: civilised and dull. For unleavened sadness, wry or otherwise, is always dull. The fragments the poet uses to shore up his ruins—those lines from the Waste Land would make an apt epigraph—lose their native vitality in his verses. But Mr Fuller's fate, as he rightly diagnoses, is the product of timidity—not personal but artistic. Eliot was right about separating the man who suffers and the artist who creates, in the sense that the artist must recreate the man not merely represent him, as Roy Fuller does. We sympathise with his noble and generous spirit, and pity his pains; but we cannot praise his art. (pp. 314-15)