[Since the publication of his first volume of verse, Poems, in 1939,] Fuller has published, including his Collected Poems [1962] (which contains items ungathered elsewhere) some eight volumes of verse, showing a continual process of development and change within clearly defined philosophic and poetic objectives. He influenced very strongly the "Movement" of the 1950's; but where those who followed him, like John Wain and Kingsley Amis, remained frozen in their attitudes, his verse developed and changed until by the end of the Sixties he had built up a body of work which gave an appropriateness as well as an inevitability to his election this year as Oxford Professor of Poetry; among the depleted ranks of contemporary English poets, he stood out in unchallenged prominence.

In some ways Fuller's career reminds one of that of Wallace Stevens. He quite deliberately avoided the pressures and perils that encompass a professional man of...