John Fuller's poetry speaks of a subtle and mysterious unease in a language of precise control and extravagant variety. Like most of his generation of English poets, he chose to write in a tradition of formal order. Unlike most of his generation, he put his talents for formal verse in the service of an unsettlingly disordered vision. That vision, less complacent, less domesticated, than the outlook of the Movement generation that preceded him, gives Fuller's poetry its enduring and unclassifiable strength. At mid-career, he shows signs of growing more disturbing in his vision as his formal control continues to develop its uncanny precision.

John Leopold Fuller was born in Ashford, Kent, to Roy Broadbent and Kathleen Smith Fuller. Roy Fuller is a poet and novelist, who began writing in the 1930s under the shadow of W. H. Auden and who later developed a fluent personal style of his...