Certainly you don't have to talk to Smith for long to realize that he relishes the thought of being odd classical man out in a society of romantics, and, from the jacket blurb of his Collected Poems, we once again learn, presumably with the author's sanction, that he knows how to be "austerely classic" in his own graceful way. It's something of a let-down to discover how merely Parnassian or decadent or imagistic his classicism can be. (pp. 11-12)

More obtrusive and far less legendary in the Smith terminology is "metaphysical" and all the phrases that Eliot … has taught us to trail along behind it: the "disparate experience", "passion and thought" or "sense and intellect", "fused" into a "unified sensibility". (p. 12)

Do unskilful classification and a perfunctory terminology really stand in the way of Smith's critical achievement? Not, I think, if we recognize where his real and remarkable virtues as a critic lie and refuse to demand what he has no intention of giving in the first place. Smith's key terms and classifications are useful only because, having provided something of the sort, he can then feel free to exercise his best talents elsewhere…. He is lucky to have discovered, and been encouraged to take on, the rôle for which his critical skills best suit him. He seems born to be an anthologizer, not of familiar, well-stocked and well-combed fields, but of virgin territory; he is happily doomed to exercise his finely perceptive and carefully developed faculty of choice on the dubious, the unpromising, the untried and the provincial, and by his example to show his readers that such choice is both possible and necessary…. In the successive editions of [A Book of Canadian Poetry] and in the more recent Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, he has given us a model of discrimination and scrupulous choice, which is salutary even for those whose preferences are very different from his. Smith offers no hard-won aesthetic principles, no freshly cleaned critical concepts, no brilliant arguments to inevitable conclusions; but one cannot read his Canadian anthologies (introduction and critical apparatus included) without responding to the firm, delicately sharpened, continuous pressures of a mind exercising its powers on materials which he finds half-alien and grudging in their Victorian beginnings, and perhaps equally alien, if a good deal richer, in their post-war ends, but which he manages somehow to coerce into satisfying the personal demands that he started with. (pp. 12-13)

Smith, then, is a critic who stands or falls by purity of perception alone. He has a critical sense so fine (to adapt Eliot's famous remark on James) that it is incapable of being violated by an idea or even the lack of one. Far from being an intellectual critic, or (as he would no doubt prefer) a "unified" or "whole" one, he shows what can be done, and perhaps can only be done, by sharpening taste at the expense of its critical companions. But he shows this not only in writing criticism. As I read [his Collected Poems], I realize, as I never did before, just how all-of-a-piece, as well as how varied, Smith's work really is. "Metaphysical poetry and pure poetry are what I stand for," he has insisted. One may be justly dubious about his "metaphysical" qualities, but he is as pure a poet as he is a critic. (pp. 13-14)

It is surely no longer necessary to waste time refuting the silliest of all the Smith legends: that his taste has stultified his invention and narrowed his range, that he has spent thirty years husbanding a minimum of creativity for a minimum of purposes. So I won't try to make a comprehensive survey of his long-sustained, inventive, and remarkably varied output, which is certainly equal in range to that of any Canadian poet of his generation. Instead, I would prefer simply to watch the Smith "purity" at work in a few characteristic places, concentrating on what he does to other poets (the tributes, parodies, pastiches and translations), where the continuity of his poetry and criticism is likely to be most apparent…. (p. 14)

I cannot possibly think that Smith's translations are not as good English poems as the originals are French ones. In fact, what could be better than his version of "Brigadier"? And the high spirits of some of these pastiches are enough to convince even the most hidebound primitive that literature which claims to forswear precedent has no monopoly on vitality. (pp. 14-15)

Fortunately, the Collected Poems allows the reader to put Smith's more ascetic mannerisms in perspective. The poet may protest too much, he may risk succumbing to a formula, he may even seem to imagine that he can escape from a soft cliché by exchanging it for a hard one, but his talent is too rich to allow doctrinaire confinement. The angularities of "The Lonely Land" do have their important share in Smith's "sort of ecstasy", but his sensibility achieves its fullest release when the crisp, clear, cold, smooth, hard, pointed, austere, lonely, etc. (I choose my list of adjectives from "To Hold a Poem") is complemented by the shimmer and fluctuation, the flash and fade, which Smith has helped us to perceive in D. C. Scott. "The Fountain", "Nightfall" and (especially) "The Circle" are more fully characteristic of Smith than "Swift Current" or "In the Wilderness" or even "The Lonely Land" itself. (pp. 15-16)

If one must use the terminology of the sacred wood, then what Smith gives us is less like Eliot's required fusion of thought and emotion than like his "emotional equivalent of thought". And if one can't resist a seventeenth-century title, there's always "cavalier" ready for the taking. But the temptation had better be resisted. Having watched Smith refuse to be contained by his own formulas, I can hardly expect him to be contained by mine…. In the meantime, the continuous liveliness of texture in these Collected Poems keep rousing my prejudices—for and against. My third thoughts about Smith are unlikely to be my last. (p. 17)