Mr. Burnshaw is a courageous man but even he, I imagine, would not have wanted the slogan "A Public Poem" printed so largely as his publisher seems to have decided. And yet he would be mistaken, for what makes [Mirages] so interesting and important is precisely that it is public in a way that poems have not been for decades. The poem concerns the Israeli-Arab problem in all its complexity. Mr. Burnshaw brings to it a complexity of his own which gives him the authority to speak. His own culture is deeply American-European as can be seen from his translation-work in The Poem Itself and his The Seamless Web, not to mention his earlier poems. But The … Web is underwritten with the Paradisal myth of man united with his natural world, and the poems return to the legend of Abraham sacrificing Isaac as does part of this work. In addition he has powerful biographical factors which enable him to feel deeply the confused issues of the middle East…. For this reason he has the right to speak publicly on these matters and he has the ear and the intelligence to do so in verse that is cumulatively compelling.

The poem stems from, and deals with, a visit that he made to the sacred and historical places in Israel and from his reaction to the people he met. And because it deals with an issue to which verse can provide no instant answer much of the tone is elegiac. (p. 142)

The poem concludes with a humanism that asks not "Who am I?" but "What am I?" and suggests the recognition of the body as our limit—an idea that underlies The Seamless Web. It is, as the poet knows, an utopian idea and not likely to be tried by numbers, on any side, sufficient to solve any problems.

What is impressive about this poem is its general accessibility to the unliterary; its resolute desire not to call attention to itself as a poem. It is, in fact, a triumph of tone. Many of the ideas and attitudes contained in the poem will not command general assent from all parties but one can consider them because they are presented in such a convincing tone of passionate sincerity. I would myself have liked to have felt that I understood the versification with its strange line-ends and variable line-lengths but in the end, this is a small criticism of such a courageous piece of work. (p. 146)