While [Miss Deutsch's] work naturally reflects the changing traditions with which she has been familiar, her best poems have never been merely modish: like Miss Moore, she has succeeded in avoiding the excesses of poetic fashion—the jewelled irrelevancies: Imagism, the elaborate riddles of the Neo-Metaphysicals, the shrill didacticism of the late thirties and early forties. Nor is she often guilty of the besetting sin of women poets: the tendency toward sentimentality and the too narrowly personal.

If anything, her work is not sufficiently personal; many of her poems have an oddly anonymous quality, as if, instead of having been written by a man or a woman, they had composed themselves out of thin air. This can, of course, be a virtue, but it can also be disconcerting: reading through a large number of these smooth, skillfully constructed poems [in Collected Poems], one finds one's self longing for...