Some of Dannie Abse's contemporaries seem to me in danger of being victims of their time, convinced by what they often hate and regret, and correspondent with those theoreticians, continental and otherwise, who consider poetry a word game, not in touch—as its parent language cannot be—with any reality beyond itself. In this shrinkage the poet, like a drowning man, is likely to clutch the personal or domestic scene, the little world immediately available to him. Modesty, though appealing in itself, is questionable as a desideratum for poetry. Yet almost inevitably it becomes the prevailing mien. Such poetry, by what it shrugs off, is bound to substantiate the theoreticians' disparaging view of it. Fortunately Dannie Abse's love of language, the richness of his heritage, and the feeling-fulness welling out of these, guarantee a sense of the copiousness of the world in his work…. Abse's work delights in...