There are few poets whose work keeps well over a generation; Smith is one of them, and in my view [his collected poems] places him clearly among the more memorable lyric poets writing in our time, not merely in Canada, but in the whole English-speaking world…. [Smith's] gathering of the poems according to manner and mood rather than time emphasises his remarkable sustenance of both emotional intensity and the lapidary craftsmanship he has always sought,

          … as hard
         And as smooth and as white
         As a brook pebble cold and unmarred …

Smith, in fact, is a poet little bound by time or place. Even the poems he wrote during the Thirties … are remarkably undated; there is nothing of the comradely fustiness that nowadays stales so much of the early Spender or Day Lewis. Indeed, if there is anything that Smith retains to place him in the period through which he has worked and lived, it is a slight rococo tang that reminds one of the Twenties rather than of the later decades in which almost all his verse was written….

If the world Smith creates in his poems is autonomous in time—a kind of poetic Laputa that might dip down as easily in the seventeenth century as in the twentieth to which its navigator inalienably belongs—it seems equally free in place. There are, admittedly, a very few poems in the collected volumes which it must be hard for the non-Canadian to apprehend…. But even his rather imagistic poems on Canadian landscapes have none of the guidebook topography one sometimes encounters in writers like Birney and Gustafson…. The familiar cedar and firs and wild duck calls in a poem like "The Lonely Land" lead us into a landscape in its feeling as mythological as any painted by Poussin for the encounters of Gods and mortals. (p. 257)

Smith divides his book into five sections which, for lack of titles, I would describe as Yeatsian Philosophical, Imagistic, Rococo Pastoral, Satire and Parody, and Metaphysical Contemplation of Death. Such titles suggest derivativeness in Smith, which I hardly think he would deny. His debt to Yeats is clear, and leads him to include an Ode on the poet's death which, with its all too obvious swan that "leaps singing into the cold air," is one of the least fortunate of his poems…. In fact, the myth of Leda fascinates Smith as much as it did Yeats.

But originality, I can imagine Smith saying, if he has not actually done so, is an illusion of the half-baked pseudo-Romantic. Experience provides the raw material for all writings, and experience is never wholly original; the experience of a literary man, particularly, includes all the books he has read and all the poems that—good or bad—have sent the shivers down his spine. Hence, like Joyce and Eliot and Pound of the half-generation just before him, Smith resorts to those sublime forms of literary criticism—the only fully creative ones: the parody, the translation (there are excellent renderings of Gautier and Mallarmé), the deliberate pastiche (the "Souvenir de Temps Perdu" written for Léon Edel), and the tribute in the manner of (finely rendered in "To Henry Vaughan"). All these are more than feats of imitative virtuosity; they are the empathic approaches of a poet who can, when he desires, be resoundingly himself.

Smith's aims are spareness, clarity, balance, the austerity of a latter-day classicism enriched by the discoveries of the Symbolists and the Imagists. Unlike the wildly intuitive versifier he celebrates in "One Sort of Poet," Smith never sings, "Let it come! Let it come!" His poems are carefully worked to the last safe moment of polishing. One is aware of the unending search for words that are "crisp and sharp and small," for a form as "skintight" as the stallions of "Far West." Occasionally the visions clarified through Smith's bright glass are too sharp for comfort, the detachment too remote for feeling to survive. More often they are saved by the dense impact of the darker shapes that lie within the crystal, the

          shadows I have seen, of me deemed deeper,
        That backed on nothing in the horrid air.

It is this enduring sense of the shapeless beyond shape that gives Smith's best poems their peculiar rightness of tension, and make his austerities so rich in implication. (p. 258)