It is rare and difficult for any poet, young or old, to find a true voice; rarer and even more difficult to adopt a new one in the notoriously barren stretches of middle age. Yet this is what Roy Fuller has splendidly done in his New Poems. The voice is both true and new. It speaks from recognizably the same man as that of the Collected Poems … and Buff …, but with a directness of personal reference quite unexpected from Mr. Fuller, whose sequences of Mythological Sonnets, Meredithian Sonnets, To X and The Historian seemed to be leading him farther and farther from himself, perhaps as a necessary corrective to what he has called "the tyranny of the personal lyric" in recent poetry. These sequences were extremely well done, but they did seem to hold dangers of boxing the poet too constrictingly in elegant pre-ordained structures, and of confining...