Literary history will almost certainly record that Roy Fuller was one of the handful of Englishmen who sustained the quality of British poetry during the relatively lean period from 1950 to 1960. George MacBeth has suggested with both humor and astuteness that Fuller was somewhat unlucky in the timing of his career. In the thirties he was too young and had written too little poetry to really be counted among the full-fledged members of Auden's army; though he wrote more first-rate poetry during the war years than any other Englishman, the war did not kill him and hence sanctify this work with an aura of great loss; and though he performed with the virtues of the Movement poetry of the fifties, he was not a fresh face and hence did not stimulate the kind of excitement which greeted the pristine Larkin, Amis, and Gunn among others. This is not the...