Since the appearance of his first volume of verse in 1931, Ronald Bottrall has been identified with the immensely influential school of criticism that was establishing itself at Cambridge University during the 1930s. F. R. Leavis, who is now recognized as sharing with I. A. Richards the leadership of that school, singled out Bottrall as the poet to watch for confirmation of the course that Leavis charted in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). In the pages of the journal Scrutiny, founded the same year, Leavis and his colleagues watched Bottrall all too closely, with the result that, in Bottrall's case at least, a flourishing school of criticism offered scant nourishment for a poet.

The man who was to achieve such early notoriety through Leavis's boosting came from the obscurity of the Cornish mining town of Camborne, where he was born Francis James Ronald Bottrall, the only child of working-class...