SOURCE: "Newer Signatures," in his The Poetry of the Thirties, St. Martin's Press, 1975, pp. 356-73.

Tolley is an English educator, editor, and critic. In the following essay, he briefly assesses Lee's poetry.

Not every poet of the thirties had a book published during that decade or even appeared extensively in periodicals. Laurie Lee seems to have been writing poems for ten years before the publication of his first book, The Sun My Monument, in 1944. He was one of the poets—among them Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne and Ruthven Todd—who appeared in the Sunday Referee poetry column around 1934. He spent some time in Spain before the Civil War, wandering from place to place and supporting himself by playing his violin.

While in Spain, he got to know the poetry of Lorca, whose influence seems to have been a congenial and enduring one in Lee's poetry. It shows in...