James Fenton's rapid rise to literary fame in the early 1980s served as a climax to the emergence of a new generation of poets brought to wide attention by the publication of two influential and competitive anthologies, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's Contemporary British Poetry (1982) and Michael Schmidt's Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland (1983). One of the few writers to have poems published in both collections, Fenton represented to many critics the best qualities of the new wave of poets who, in Seamus Heaney's words, were "highly self-conscious ... anticonfessional, detached, laconic, and strangely popular considering their various devices for keeping the reader at arm's length." Fenton's real importance, however, does not come from his position as herald to a new generation but from the excellence of his poetry, which is unsurpassed among that of his contemporaries for its range, skill, and intelligence.

Fenton's unique accomplishment has been...