[The Anathemata] is an attempt to create a kind of summa of poetic experience ranging through the world and time and has much in common with Pound's Cantos. The Weltanschauung of The Anathemata is one of a magnificent diversity, fundamentally optimistic and beautifully ordered. It is a coherent vision and one which—in contrast to much modern poetry—sees integration rather than disintegration as the chief characteristic of life.

The Anathemata is a work which defies attempts at classification. It shares the qualities of chronicle, epic, drama, incantation and lyric and is at the same time none of these and more than all put together. The poet himself defected in his own description of it as 'fragments of an attempted writing', and yet this does contain a necessary truth. He is right to call it an attempt—an attempt at a vision of Britain…. What distinguishes the Cantos...