SOURCE: “Moving Unnoticed: Notes on Robert Francis's Poetry,” in The Hollins Critic, Vol. 14, No. 4, October, 1977, pp. 1-12.

In the following essay, Nelson provides an overview of the central themes and stylistic elements of Francis's poetry.

I

September, 1976, marked the publication of the Collected Poems of an American poet who at seventy-six has written quietly over the past half-century a body of poems which deserves to be celebrated. The poet is Robert Francis. His career was long characterized by a lack of recognition—Robert Frost called him America's “best neglected poet”—and even after the publication of The Orb Weaver by Wesleyan in 1960 and Come Out into the Sun by the University of Massachusetts in 1968 helped change this situation to some degree, his work has continued to be omitted from most of the anthologies which have tried to represent the best contemporary American poetry. It seems to me that...