[In] contrast to most of his contemporaries, Mr. Fuller still believes in the unambiguous direct statement about immediate issues. [Many of the new poems collected in Epitaphs and Occasions], occasional and informal in the best sense, are concerned with the relation of the individual's integrity to the collective good; others with the positive meanings of art in a society doomed by the pressure of outside events…. [One] aspect of Mr. Fuller's recent development [is his] realization of the dichotomy between the role of art, making coherent and discernible the unformulated, and the enormous "death by nature, chanceless, credible." The word "art" appears almost obsessively in these poems, and Mr. Fuller uses it as a sort of final reference, Olympian but powerless, to suggest the kind of myths to which the sensitive individual holds after having discarded the cleft stick of religion and politics. Yet, although Mr. Fuller assumes defeat for the curious "dyspeptic, bookish, half-alive" figure he projects of himself, he still believes

         Confused and wrong though things have gone
         There is a side we can be on:
         Distaste for lasting bread and peace
         May thus support a King in Greece
         And trust in General Chiang Kai-shek
         Will safely lead to freedom's wreck.

It is this essential rationalism, this urgent belief in the necessity of moral action, however trivially stated, that is most notable in Mr. Fuller's poems. He has ruthlessly simplified his verse-forms to enable his writing, without change of tone, to move easily through very different kinds of theme, while the meaning remains transparent. Mr. Fuller's latest manner is perhaps over-reminiscent in style of the early Auden, possibly also of the colloquial Byron. But that, and the latter especially, is the most healthy tradition for contemporary English verse, whose greatest need is for more clarity of thought and greater preciseness in technique. Moreover, Mr. Fuller is exact where Mr. Auden is only vaguely impressive; though he is not such a sparkling writer, the lines he chooses to "throw away" contain seriously considered antitheses where Mr. Auden's tended only to arrest. It is impossible here t o suggest every aspect of a book so closely packed as this. Epitaphs and Occasions, as its title hints, is not ambitiously creative writing at full stretch; but its best poems are minor verse at its most accomplished. There is no other contemporary poet who reduces so much thought, socially or politically crucial in the widest sense, to so small a space as Mr. Fuller has done in this book. The form of the poems may make them seem, at first glance, rather slight, but their content is highly condensed, varied, often both moving and witty. Beneath Mr. Fuller's rather fusty cloak of minor, saddened distemper a major poet is waiting to be revealed. Of his importance there is no question.