It is shameful to be curt with Michael Hamburger, but I feel his Real Estate suffers … from its travels. It is the fairly depressive constancy of Hamburger's personality that is emphasised by the movement, not the variousness of moods and worlds. The phrase 'Ah well' came somewhere in the book, but it could have come everywhere. A possible exception might have been the long philosophical poem 'Travelling', which Hamburger has been working up to this definitive length for some years; but by now, the title-term seems to me to have become over-loaded with meanings—and the one that suffers the worst damage is that condition of swishing weightlessness of spirit which I suspect the poet most highly prizes. (p. 448)

Russell Davies, "Ah Well," in New Statesman (© 1977 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 94, No. 2428, September 30, 1977, pp. 448-49.∗