The blurb to Mr. Fuller's Collected Poems—an unusually platitudinous one—implies that he is, above all, a continually developing poet. This is seriously misleading, for it neatly misses the point: he is, in the proper sense, an occasional poet—the most worthy of his time. What may have seemed like a consistent poetic development to the blurb-writer is in reality a record of the changing attitudes of a remarkably sensitive and good-hearted man. (Some modern exponents of verse would deny that good-heartedness has anything to do with poetry—they have to; but it does, and it is one of Mr. Fuller's strongest assets.) Genuinely readable and unpretentious though he is, Mr. Fuller's use of language has not undergone that change which alone can justify the word "developing": diction, texture, rhythm, tone—all these have remained more or less constant throughout his twenty-five years' work. He does many...