If I try to delineate the character of Robert Finch's sensibility, I find myself wanting to say, perhaps in too large and general a way, that it is a sensibility which aspires to make explicit—but explicit in a way proper to poetry—the Europeanism latent in the Canadian spirit…. The first thing that is striking about Finch is the unity of his sensibility…. Robert Finch has a beautifully coherent and single sensibility, subject and detail, thought and feeling, tone and lang...

Reading through [Poems], I felt that Mr. Finch was more concerned with the advantages of mental exercise in verse form than with the writing of poetry. There are, it is true, some fine effects of music and imagery in Poems; there are occasional poems which attain a higher level than the book as a whole. But in general the author is too much occupied with (a) versifying a moral truism and (b) playing a sort of verbal chess. (p. 38) Mr. Finch is nearly always simple when he seems profound. He plays with rhyme...

Robert Finch is an urbane poet in a nation that is too often content merely with becoming urban. He writes with poise and self-consciousness. The Dionysic fury never leads him where his reason would not have him go, and his craftsmanship is controlled and accurate. Thus, one imagines, Flaubert might write if another incarnation made him a Canadian poet instead of a French novelist. These qualities, which at once grace and limit his verse, were already evident in Dr. Finch's first volume, Poems, publi...

Robert Finch's verse at its best has a mannered dexterity, an ornate lucidity, and a studiously restrained tone that is capable alike of light grace and poignant though delicately phrased emotion. In his second volume, "Strength of the Hills", his work, it must be confessed, is less often at its best than in his previous collection. There are a couple of brilliant catalogues, several descriptive pieces with the clarity of outline and elegance of color that delighted his earlier readers,...