SOURCE: Bayley, John. “Living Ghosts.” New York Review of Books 44, no. 5 (27 March 1997): 18–21.

In the following excerpt, Bayley offers a positive assessment of The Bounty, referring to Walcott as “a poet of singular honesty.”

What is the nature of the difference between poetry and “the poetical”? The two cannot be clearly separated and yet they do remain distinct: a distinction clearly apparent to a later generation, after the poets in question have themselves departed for the Elysian fields. What is poetical then begins to resemble a period piece. Could anyone have ever been physically thrilled and startled, stirred and electrified, by, for example. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads? And yet they were. Readers—young readers—knew them at once for the true thing—exciting, authentic, and subversive. Today they move the sympathetic reader in another way: as a poetical voice from the past.

The whole question remains ambiguous nonetheless. It...