Gavin Ewart's literary career started almost precociously when, in 1933, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, his long poem "Phallus in Wonderland" was published by Geoffrey Grigson in New Verse--the literary magazine well-known for publishing Auden and his circle in the 1930s. In a footnote to this poem in The Collected Ewart (1980), the poet explains that he had excluded it from his first book of verse (Poems and Songs, 1939) "because of its immaturity. It shows very clearly the influences of T. S. Eliot, the Pound of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Ronald Bottrall." Although, in the same footnote, Ewart remarks that "Auden, in early 1933, was not yet making his presence felt," nevertheless "Phallus in Wonderland" has affinities also with the Auden of poems such as "Paid on Both Sides," with its cogitations by various personae. A coevolution with Auden remained central to his development--the poet and critic Peter Porter was...