SOURCE: “Three Poets,” in Poetry, Vol. 97, No. 2, November, 1960, pp. 109-10.

In the following excerpt, Lindeman offers a favorable review of Francis's The Orb Weaver, comparing the poet to Robert Frost.

The Orb Weaver is Robert Francis's fifth book of poems. The attitude, style and tone are much the same as they were in 1938. His world is rural New England, but not a New England which has undergone any significant changes during the past twenty-five years. It is a world of personal observations made within a quiet, peaceful, static environment walled off from the loud, blaring events of Mr. Auden's “age of anxiety.”

Though Mr. Francis lacks the gritty muscularity of Robert Frost, he can stand side by side with the elder poet as an exponent of pantheistic serenity. He speaks of vines: one as “Thick as a man's wrist”; another that “swept a tree like fire”; and still...