SOURCE: A review of Come Out into the Sun, in Antioch Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer, 1966, pp. 276-277.

In the following review, Allen provides a favorable assessment of Francis's Come Out into the Sun, expressing the opinion that Francis deserves a wider audience for his poetry.

Another New Englander, Robert Francis, escaped the past long ago. His new and selected poems confirm his stature. Francis is a poet to be read and reread, a poet who shapes his lines to perfect forms, graceful, unforced balances. Listen to him in “Hogwash”:

What beside sports and flowers could you find To praise better than the American language? 

Bruised by American foreign policy What shall I soothe me, what defend me with 

But a handful of clean unmistakable words— Daisies, daisies, in a field of daisies? 

Or in “The Articles of War”:

Somebody next, who knows? may try Resigning from the human...