Wilson Harris has done most of his work in the novel form, but his second volume of poetry, Eternity to Season, published three years after the first [Fetish], demonstrates that he is also a poet of some substance. Fetish is pretentious rather than substantial, due largely to metaphoric excesses that make for a turgid, unreadable style. Eternity to Season is much better written on the whole, but it too suffers from the old excesses in spots. It seems that Harris himself is aware of this fault since in a recent reprint of the collection he has excised some of the troublesome verbiage. But a recurrent drawback is not simply verbiage as such but also a matter of feeling. There is a flood of carefully devised images which sometimes fail to communicate the kind of intellectual and emotional pressure that would justify such an abundance. In works like "The Beggar Is King" this lack of justification results in a pompous incongruity between subject (the impoverished Guyanese laborer) and the obvious, rather obtrusive convolutions of Harris' imagery. Curiously enough, Harris at his metaphoric worst is not distracting (in the tradition of most poets who suffer from the same affliction) but simply monotonous. In "Rice," for example, the relentless succession of metaphoric elaborations and convoluted statements creates its own peculiar sameness. (pp. 93-4)

The dramatic poem "Canje," set in a rural Guyanese village, is awkwardly executed throughout with a great deal of excessive writing. But Harris' general drift is always arresting. Ancitipating Derek Walcott's Another Life by nearly twenty years, Harris' poem examines the lives of his folk through the archetypes of Greek myth—Ulysses, Tiresias, Achilles, and so forth. The objective conforms with the bicultural dimensions within which Harris and others perceive the West Indian experience. The Greco-Guyanese myth-heroes embody the duality of the Guyanese experience; and more specifically, the poet-seer Tiresias now represents the Guyanese poet as the essence and analyst of that duality: the bisexual image of Tiresias symbolizes the bicultural identity of the poet, his imagination, and his folk. (p. 94)

Harris is using [the] archetypal roots of Greco-Roman and Western culture as a means of exploring the cultural roots of the West Indies: the very concept and use of archetypes are based on a preoccupation with a sense of roots. Moreover, the archetypal mode is used to explore time-as-experience. The archetype is the creation of the past, a symbol and function of the links between past and present, and accordingly, the poet's perspective on the cultural history of his own world. Hence in "Teiresias" the poet-as-seer represents the ability to perceive the future in the present, just as the "Teiresias" archetype himself embodies a continuity between the (Greco-Roman) past and the (Afro-West Indian) present…. (pp. 94-5)

"Teiresias" is one of those rare poems in which Harris sustains an ease and a directness of statement without lapsing into strangling verbiage. And this achievement may be of special significance since Tiresias as poet and seer represents the clarity of a fully aware perception of history and the role of the artist. (p. 95)

On the whole "Achilles" is another well written poem displaying the kind of discipline which allows Harris to blend his archetypal symbolism (mobility, power, creativity) into his central theme with economy and precision. This is also true of "Creation" in which the abstraction of Harris' theme (creation itself as freedom and infinite power) is developed without undue flourish in a succession of clearly defined and concrete images. First, that familiar Guyanese sense of an infinite landscape lends itself easily to the grasp of creation as an infinite, universal force…. Second, it is an "immensity of greatest power" that is symbolized by that ocean which links Harris' continent with the West Indian islander's perennial consciousness of the sea. Thirdly, it is represented by the "strips of coast" that are Guyana itself with its Afro-West Indian capacity to survive and transcend the Middle Passage past through a "celebration of spirit." And fourthly, to complete the pattern of increasingly specialized, or microcosmic examples, creation is the individual spirit itself…. The pattern of the poem progresses inward from the perception of a universal macrocosm to the individual as microcosm. As such it represents a kind of focusing. It is therefore an aesthetic confirmation of Harris' emphasis on perception as movement and on creation as an endless, infinite movement. In poems like these Harris' craftsmanship is superb, and the clarity of vision is unsurpassed. After this volume of poetry he turns to prose fiction, producing a series of some of the most distinguished novels in West Indian literature. But even on its own and despite its undeniable shortcomings Eternity to Season represents a major contribution to the West Indian poet's exploration of time and history in the Caribbean experience. (pp. 95-6)