Setting aside Eliot's "Four Quartets," F. T. Prince's "Soldiers Bathing" is perhaps the finest poem in English to come out of World War II; and this is widely acknowledged. Why has he never since done anything so good? This brutal question has to be asked, now that we have the "Collected Poems" of this most self-effacing poet…. Certainly to Mr. Prince in middle age, looking back on himself as an Oxford student in 1931 newly arrived from South Africa, it seemed that the business of poetry, for himself and for others, was "the beyond."… I wonder if he recognizes what a giveaway this is to coarse-grained readers like myself, who ask of poetry precisely this earth, this sea, this sun, this wind; who find this specificity in "Soldiers Bathing" and after that only once in all his work—in the Poland, Hungary and White Russia of "Drypoints of the...