In Not Without Glory (1976), his study of poets of World War II, Vernon Scannell asserts that "the best poetry of the war, the most truthful and penetrating was written with a respect for that tradition of English verse which is informed by the spirit of Milton's words, 'simple, sensuous and passionate,' a poetry which is rooted in the ground of physical experience, suspicious of the abstract and conforming to the disciplines of provenly effective forms." He might be characterizing his own best poetry. For more than thirty years Scannell has written poems that meet the challenges of established forms while drawing on his vivid experiences as soldier, boxer, lover, husband and father, tutor and lecturer, broadcaster, drinker, and general survivor. His eventful, unconventional life allied him naturally, but briefly, in the 1950s with the Mavericks, poets as much at odds with the literary establishment as Scannell had...