Klein's best poetry did, evidently, get into his [earlier] books. The lesser work [also included in The Collected Poems of A. M. Klein] is interesting, especially the "Radical Poems, 1932–1938", for the light it throws on Klein's growth. But most readers will return to Hath Not a Jew … (1940) and Poems (1944), and will agree with [the editor] Miriam Waddington that in his last volume, The Rocking Chair (1948), Klein "finally found his true tongue and voice." It is in the late poems that the elaborate rhetoric, personifications, archaisms and stylized ejaculations enter into a more vital tension with the energy of ordinary speech: and Klein's unique poetic style comes into its own.

There is disappointment in store for those who want more understanding of the legendary twenty years' oblivion which set in and stifled Klein's genius just when it had reached its maturity in the early 1950's. Would those unpublished poems...