There are several bad reasons for admiring [Ariel], and they are intricately involved with the good ones. The poems conform exactly to a stereotyped contemporary idea: that poems should be a strenuous exploration of suffering, the more painful the better…. Above all they are full of images, terribly direct and sinister, of blood, an inhuman sap pulsing through people's bodies, driving them on to more and more painful living, or seeping out of them like sawdust to bring the pain to an end.

The personal tragedy behind them entirely confirms the 'sincerity' of these preoccupations—we are dealing neither with affectation nor coincidence—but doesn't make them any easier to discuss. (p. 687)

Some neutral qualities are easy to observe. Sometimes the imagery, especially of children born and unborn, is straightforwardly enlivening, energetic and pleasurable…. One can also admire the authoritative use of free verse: what at first seems...