SOURCE: An introduction to Complete Verse, Pimlico, 1991, pp. iii-x.

In the following essay, Wilson provides a brief and favorable overview of Belloc's poetry.

When my biography of Hilaire Belloc appeared in 1983, it was discussed on a television programme. I watched with some trepidation, since the reviews of my book, which had been appearing in the English newspapers during the previous two weeks, had displayed a passionate hostility to Belloc—one critic stating that 'as a man, Belloc must have been about as congenial as nuclear waste', and another writing about Belloc's supposed 'malignity' in tones which would have required little modification if he had been describing Dr. Goebbels. Was all this hatred inspired solely by Belloc's anti-Semitism? If so, why was not similar odium heaped on the work of Dickens, or Thackeray, or T.S. Eliot, or G.K. Chesterton, or Virginia Woolf, or Proust, by the bien-pensant...