Collectively, [the verses of The First Four Books of Poems] echo and reaffirm a prolific anthology of tongues, testifying, of course, to Merwin as translator, one of the most authentic practitioners we have today. Imitations, in the best sense, accomplished exercises in an abundance of forms, their sources are variably the Biblical tales, Classical myth, love songs from the Age of Chivalry, Renaissance retellings; they comprise carols, roundels, odes, ballads, sestinas and they contrive golden equivalents of emblematic models: the masque, the Zodiac, The Dance of Death. Had Merwin never written any verse of his own save this, he would compel the ear of anyone decently educated to the liberal euphonies of the accumulated tradition. Were you to redistribute these poems, unsigned, among collections of translated material or of English Poetry Down the Ages, any but the most erudite reader would heedlessly accept them as renderings of Theocritus, Catullus, Ronsard or, on a venture, as having been written by an anonymous Elizabethan, by George Herbert, by Thomas Campion, by Thomas Lovell Beddoes—or by Tennyson.

Critics are fond of pinpointing the moment at which a poet "finds his own voice." He finds it when he writes a successful poem: one that being heard gives pleasure, even if the immediate tune recalls that of a predecessor…. Merwin's great composite themes of seagoing and wreck, of the beast under the waters of consciousness announced by "Leviathan" in Green With Beasts (an essay in accentual verse that surpasses, to my ear, Pound's "The Seafarer"), were not suddenly … torn from the void; they had already surfaced, occasional, played down but palpable, in the earlier context. At the outset … "Anabasis" I and II, had introduced the maritime journey, and in line given to Proteus (in The Dancing Bears), attribution allowed for, "Odysseus" … is recognizably prefigured….

One thing is certain. Before embarking on the narratives published in 1956 and after, Merwin was in secure formal command: shape and duration, melody, vocal inflection, were under superb control. No stanzaic model was alien to him; no line length was beyond his dexterity. Liberated from rhyme, if need be, having structured many of his poems into unrhymed units of 6 lines each—or 7, 9, 11, even 13 and 17—he was now prepared to launch into those lengthy, undivided blank-verse monologues, rhythmic without falter, solemn yet "conversational," which initiate Green with Beasts like organ voluntaries…. All these but "Leviathan" conjure the scenic ambience (and hints of Christian revelation) of a T. S. Eliot wasteland: dusty plains, olive trees, slack tents, "garden terraces / Vague through the afternoon, remembering rain; / But in the night green with beasts", and in "White Goat, White Ram" threads of Eliotic diction show conspicuously in the weave…. This is a rare instance, however, of almost completely opaque language; the general atmosphere of these poems is achieved visually and the effect is in every case slowly hair-raising. (p. 4)