[Morgan] makes statements, lots of them, and his poems are not ingenious but deeply intelligent. Since the death of Auden, who brought a tremendous range of speculation and knowledge into his poetry, Morgan seems to me to stand out almost unchallenged as a poet of ideas.

In case I seem to be saying that Morgan is a poet like Auden, let me add at once that he has nothing like the same gift for the felicitous phrase and is altogether a heavier, more viscous writer. He resembles Auden only insofar as the two of them are natural intellectuals. (p. 75)

Morgan, for his part, is a poet of amplitude. He is interested in so many things, the beam of his vision flashes round so widely, that he needs space to work in. People who like neat, epigrammatic poetry will not often like his longer poems, where a certain torrential...