The quality of Roy Fuller's Collected Poems must make any honest reviewer ask himself once more what truly relevant comment he can offer. To say what sort of poetry it is is not to convey its excellences….

[Fuller's] standing as a poet is one of the two or three highest of those now writing. Yet his reputation is mainly among poets and readers of poetry. The professional critics, busy with estimates of Pound, have scarcely looked at him. His name does not ring glamorously round the campuses—and this alone is enough for us to write off completely all fashionable American opinion about British verse.

This American neglect is even odder when one considers that Fuller is in effect doing what Wallace Stevens tried to do, failing because of a streak of frivolity and dilettantism, and perhaps for lack of an adequate rhythmic sense too. For Fuller's humanism arises not only from the generalities of society and the particulars of love and suffering, but also from the particulars of seeing and understanding, of man's grasp of the phenomenal world.

Fuller is (or anyhow was throughout most of the period covered by this book) a Marxist poet. It would be idle to deny that this has sometimes led him to descend from his broader vision to a ludicrous close-up: as when he maintains that support for the constitutional Greek government against the loathsome Zachariades can only have been motivated by dislike of bread and peace. To yield this facile assent to formula in a matter of political detail is objectionable poetically, regardless of the political philosophy. But such blemishes are rare….

[On] the whole his Marxism is one side of a powerful and positive virtue. He is doing what Pound pretended to do—seeing the human condition in a vast social and historical perspective. It is an insult to Fuller to compare them at all: but a crucial difference is that Pound affects to work up to the grandiose from a potty little economic fiddle, while Fuller starts with the wide vision. He sees … a various unity forming one long human drama. This gives him what is commonly lacking in modern poets, a properly rooted tragic sense.

For his verse is not social for social's sake, but for man's. His themes, particularly in his later poems, are from the whole human sphere: all those extremities which the philosophies and religions have failed to allay. Ageing, sex, dying, pity, nostalgia, melancholy: the lacrimae rerum, and some of the cachinnationes rerum too, played out on a grand stage. Even the comic servant in his Faust cycle, complaining of vulgar lusts which he can no longer satisfy, is essentially an adjunct and broadening of tragedy, and even tragic himself. Moreover Fuller is never really happy with anything resembling a social millennium. In the Justish City

                    full of bread and wine
       I shall dream of the discipline of insomnia
       And an art of symbols, starved and saturnine.

Similarly, from the Freudian type of thought he derives not a setpiece of mechanistic concepts, but the human being, caught yet conscious, in his Condition. In fact, the moods and ideas of the Thirties are strong upon Fuller: but he wears them with a difference. It would be hard to deny that the vigour and the inventiveness of Auden and MacNeice was accompanied by a certain slapdashness, a tenuousness and sometimes frivolity of matter. I am not wanting to imply that 'density' and 'tension' are the most important criteria of poetic merit: such a notion is one of the dullest-minded of recent critical generalities, and would involve one in asserting that Crashaw was a better poet than Marlowe or Dryden. Yet Fuller has, typically, managed to combine the best effects and strengths of both types of writing. He is the heir, not only of the lucidity and power of Auden, but also of the vividness and penetration of the best in symbolism.

Fuller's phrasing is individual and unmistakable to the point sometimes of caricature; though never of contrivance….

In his later poems there is often an uncertain calm….

[Fuller's] resources are all the usable ones of traditional, and of 'modern,' English poetry: a rare and remarkable fusion. Moreover, although this Collected Poems unaccountably omits a number of fine poems from his first book, and the newest 'Meredithian Sonnets' are not his best work, we can yet follow the development of increasing scope and mastery. Eccentricity and preconception drop off like boosters, leaving the second stage of a free personality shameless in its skill, sincerity, sanity and sensitivity.

No book by even the best of English poets is faultless, but Fuller's flaws are meagre and peripheral. Some adjectives ('enormous') are overdone. In spite of his view that 'poetry should be intelligible,' there are obscurities (what are the 'foliate five' acts?). Occasional mannerisms annoy—throwaway images justified only by rhyme; Auden or others echoing too closely; and so on. But in general his verse has that naturalness and rightness of tone, even when the language is least colloquial, which arises from an intrinsic and personal unity. It happily comprehends (as no unity prescribed by critical preconception can) lyric and rhetoric, statement and metaphor, concretion and abstraction.