Precocity is the first element in David Gascoyne that the literary historian notices. Gascoyne brought out his first volume of poetry when he was sixteen, and by the age of twenty he had had three further books published. Two of these, A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935) and Man's Life is this Meat (1936), embody his response, unusually wide and deep for an English writer, to European literary movements and particularly to the poetry of twentieth-century France, a great deal of which he has translated. Awareness of French poetry influenced him to become, for a time in the mid-1930s, a surrealist: in 1942 Francis Scarfe described him as "the only English writer who integrally accepted Surrealism and abandoned himself to its tender mercies." But by then Gascoyne had already emerged from surrealism, and in the following year he produced Poems, 1937-1942, which is among the most distinguished and powerful collections...