Robert Wells, one of a number of young poets currently published by the PN Review and Carcanet Press, has been praised most often for the classical purity of form and subject in his poetry. Deeply influenced by long study of Greek and Latin poetry, his style is lucid and carefully wrought. His orientation to the world is at once objective and also morally engaged.

For his commitment to formal clarity, Wells is frequently associated with his friends and contemporaries Clive Wilmer and Dick Davis. Thom Gunn and Yvor Winters have also been cited as modern poets whose ideas harmonize with Wells's own practice, and one can detect echoes of the British preromantics--especially William Collins. Thomas Gray, William Cowper, and James Thomson--in the landscape poems of The Winter's Task (1977). Nonetheless, Wells's style is finally a particular and original one, developing in calm, stable, and transparent forms a modern pastoral...