Since "Resemblances between the life and character of Hazard are not disclaimed but are much fewer than the author would like," we can take Hazard [of Hazard, the Painter] as Meredith's model of an admirable man as well as his opportunity to speak of himself in the third person—perhaps not such a surprising tactic in a poet so decorous and diffident, but a very surprising one in a poet who has spoken so beautifully for himself in his own person so often in the past.

In devising a persona through whom he will talk, Meredith places his voice at too far a remove from his experience (Hazard's experience is of course Meredith's, whether historically true or not); the voice becomes so elusive that Meredith is often in danger of vanishing from his own poetry…. [We] realize with acute discomfort that we're hearing Meredith talking about how Meredith talks about Hazard. Such convolution shows the seams of the art; the fiction evaporates and we're left with psychological history instead of poetry. What we finally hear is neither a whole characterization nor a whole poet, but a dispossessed consciousness shunting back and forth between the two.

Except for Hazard's equanimity in accepting age, it's hard to know why Meredith finds him admirable. (pp. 220-21)

Hazard seems out of touch with his own problems. His usual tactic, at Meredith's instigation, is to approach the boundary of a serious thought, perform a graceful manoeuvre of retreat (through wit or irony or grand sentiment or whatever), and withdraw—undefeated because unengaged. In fact, this is a remarkably unengaged book: though Meredith speaks in the final poem of Hazard's being "Gnawed by a vision of rightness / which no one else seems to see," we have no sense that Hazard is a tormented man. Dilemmas he has, but they are calm ones, presented in a measured decorous tone (a continuing hallmark of Meredith's style) which belies any real agitation. Hazard's most strenuous reflections have the casual cadences of a weekend stroll through the woods—Frost without pain, you might say. Skydiving one bright October day, Hazard "calls out to the sky, his voice / the voice of an animal that makes not words / but a happy, incorrigible noise, not / of this time" ("Hazard's Optimism"). Hazard is so good-humored that his most pessimistic thought is buoyed up by the "happy incorrigible noise" of his optimism. His most remarkable talent is his ability to frustrate thought about matters that frustrate him…. In "His Plans for Old Age," Hazard towels his aging body in front of the mirror: "He thinks about Titian and Renoir a lot / in this connection." It's easy to guess what he might think about Titian and Renoir; still, since Hazard is preoccupied with age it would be interesting to know. But Hazard doesn't tell us; Hazard's mind is on vacation.

"In all fairness," however, this is admittedly a kind of holiday book, one that issues from and describes a summer lull in the painter's life, a fallow period during which he is content to laze into early winter and the first snow whereupon he finally picks up his brush in earnest and gets down to work. The best expression of the book's prevailing mood, and one of its best poems, is "Rhode Island"…. Quite a good poem, and reminiscent of Meredith at his quiet, cultivated best: the gentle wit; the graceful handling of a line which wonderfully replicates Hazard's lazy, random thought; that dextrously placed concluding joke whereby the enervated Hazard continues occupying a necessary space while the small frets of his life chatter on about him. But the charm of the poem derives from its inconsequentiality as much as from anything else.

That's a part of the hazard Meredith takes with his new book—the risk of making poetry out of slim occasions. But perhaps his largest risk lies in continuing to make poetry out of a sensibility which in its easy optimism, its insulating comforts, and its abiding concerns for custom and ceremony must seem to many quite at odds with the prevailing spirit of our times, not least to Meredith himself. (pp. 221-24)