Fenton is as clever and ingenious as anyone around, but he is alone among his contemporaries in having a great deal to write about. He has all the civil virtues, the wit, the technical cunning, the seductive fluency but he has subordinated them to something much larger and more powerful; a vision of recent history, and his own personal place in it, that is at once intellectually demanding, morally and politically complex, wide in its human sympathies, and shot through with a sane and sober humour. Fenton's poems have a very high relative density….

[The] poems in "The Memory of War" date back as far as his student days at Oxford…. His work then was sprightly, cultivated, domestic; thoroughly Oxonian in manner, even down to its nervous brushes with International Socialism. A jaunty air of fun-over-the-teacakes clings to Fenton's early poems…. Fenton was entertainingly tough on the notion...