[Like] Wordsworth, Smith has obscured his progress as a poet by arranging [Collected Poems] subjectwise, not chronologically. The book is divided into five sections, the opening poem of each nicely chosen to announce the section's mood or theme. Though one's chief curiosity about a poet who has reached the stage of his collected poems thus remains unsatisfied, it seems to me that the shape of the book comes off completely. Smith is above all a clever, literary and fastidious poet, and what, looked at over the years, might have seemed too fragmentary or eclectic in his work, is given by this arrangement a cumulative and intellectually stimulating effect. This is seen very clearly in Part 2, a section of "imagist" poems. We take these more as evidence of the poet's interest in the scrupulous finding of accurate words for the accurate observation of nature than, as might easily have been, a manifestation of the somewhat stale zeitgeist emanating from the vers libre, no initial capitals, period of Flint, H. D. and the rest. (p. 8)

[Against the background of the times] Smith's Collected Poems are all the finer an achievement. Not to have remained bogged down by either strict traditional forms of "strict" vers libre, not to have been daunted by the new-found social concerns of the poetry of the thirties, nor to have collapsed with their collapse—these are manifestations of character and intellect that must, I think, be taken into account in assessing the volume.

Of course, I have been conceiving of Smith as an English poet and I think this is right, though he has spent almost all his life in the Western Hemisphere and has clearly learnt much from his contemporaries in the United States. But he plainly takes his place in the gap between Blunden and Day Lewis rather than in that between (say) Hart Crane and Richard Eberhart. And, again, this is being complimentary about his poetic nature, for it cannot have been easy to commute spiritually between Canada and some metropolitan source of style and idea.

With all this in mind even the aspects of Smith's work that I find least satisfactory take on a necessitous quality. The poems influenced by Yeats, for instance, are perhaps somewhat of a mistake, but one sees that for so bookish (I do not use the term pejoratively) a writer the themes of human love, the making of paraphraseable statements, and so forth, were a most useful discipline—far better than that which might been more congenially provided by some less forthright American poet. Then, too, though we may feel now that the poem of anecdotal clarity but obfuscated significance does not entirely withstand the passage of time, I guess that Smith's writing of such pieces enabled him to move from his rather bloodless and formalistic early imagism to the often remarkably universal statements of his later verse. I find (though I realize I may be alone in this) his charm less excusable. It is a native quality, though it is also shown in his choice of poets for translation (Gautier and Prévert, for example: he is a dazzling translator and has obviously used this exercise from time to time to keep himself going as a poet). (p. 9)

Smith's wit (in the broadest sense)—the epigrammatic statement, the paring away of inessentials (and above all his verse is extraordinarily gnomic)—extends to all his work, even the most serious and seriously felt. The high-water mark of this book is its last section, on death—but such a theme does not mean for Smith, as it would for many poets, the portentous, the high-falutin, strain, sentimentality, self-pity. The wry view of the world, the restrained and precise use of epithet, the masterly technique, continue. In some of these poems ("Prothalamium", "The Two Sides of a Drum", "The Bird", "On Knowing Nothing", "My Death", "Epitaph"—and the last poem of the previous section, "The Bridegroom") Smith achieves the force and clarity which throughout the more ambitious poems of the rest of the volume we have been concerned with might not be quite within his scope. A few are lyrics in the classic tradition….

Others, more remarkable, contain a less impersonal realization of these high themes:

    No matter: each must read the truth himself,
    Or, reading it, reads nothing to the point.
    Now these are me, whose thought is mine, and hers,
    Who are alone here in this narrow room—
    Tree fumbling pane, bell tolling,
    Ceiling dripping and the plaster falling,
    And Death, the voluptuous, calling.

All help in the end to put this collection, despite its spareness, among the most distinguished, I believe, of the century. (p. 10)