SOURCE: “Vernon Watkins, Poet of Tradition,” in The Texas Quarterly, Vol. VII, No. 2, Summer, 1964, pp. 173-89.

In the following excerpt, Raine discusses the work of Vernon Watkins, finding similarities in themes and styles with the works of William Blake and William Butler Yeats.

I first heard of Vernon Watkins in the nineteen thirties from Dylan Thomas at a party given by the editor of New Verse, the magazine to which all the young poets of those days contributed. We were discussing, as the young will, driven by the partly noble, partly ignoble, passion to excel in our art, who was the best poet then writing. The obvious names were Auden, Spender, MacNeice, and Day Lewis, but there were others. “I am the best poet now writing,” I remember Dylan Thomas exclaiming with a boyish indignation. He then went on to praise “The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait,” which...