[Since the publication of his first volume of verse, Poems, in 1939,] Fuller has published, including his Collected Poems [1962] (which contains items ungathered elsewhere) some eight volumes of verse, showing a continual process of development and change within clearly defined philosophic and poetic objectives. He influenced very strongly the "Movement" of the 1950's; but where those who followed him, like John Wain and Kingsley Amis, remained frozen in their attitudes, his verse devel...

Probably no living English poet has taken up more constantly than Roy Fuller the themes of the man in the street and the poet in his society. He feels himself to be an ordinary man, a member of a mass civilization, with a job (albeit a responsible one, as solicitor to a large building society) which ties him to quotidian matters: "Builders of realms, their tenants for an hour". But as a poet, as an alert and mordantly perceptive observer with an ironic overview of human affairs and a reverence...

Literary history will almost certainly record that Roy Fuller was one of the handful of Englishmen who sustained the quality of British poetry during the relatively lean period from 1950 to 1960. George MacBeth has suggested with both humor and astuteness that Fuller was somewhat unlucky in the timing of his career. In the thirties he was too young and had written too little poetry to really be counted among the full-fledged members of Auden's army; though he wrote more first-rate poetry during the w...

The quality of Roy Fuller's Collected Poems must make any honest reviewer ask himself once more what truly relevant comment he can offer. To say what sort of poetry it is is not to convey its excellences…. [Fuller's] standing as a poet is one of the two or three highest of those now writing. Yet his reputation is mainly among poets and readers of poetry. The professional critics, busy with estimates of Pound, have scarcely looked at him. His name does not ring glamorously round the camp...

If being a philosophic poet means finding, in all the changing conditions of one's life, the poetic correlative—the tone and language—appropriate to one's reflections on inner and outer experience, then Roy Fuller is perhaps the best philosophic poet writing in English today, the nearest to Matthew Arnold in his time, or Wordsworth in his. Indeed, perhaps the reference to Wordsworth is more apposite than an immediate glance through Fuller's poetry might suggest, for both h...

Though [Souvenirs] is a prose memoir and [The Reign of Sparrows] a book of poems, they form two halves of the same sexagenarian drama. There are the same themes: tributes to dead friends and relatives, reflections on music and poetry, and above all preoccupation with age—its destruction of the body … and its surprising consolations…. The same voice informs both volumes—a voice with many different tones (in turns it is confessional and evasive, immodest and self-deprecating, dry-a...

The blurb to Mr. Fuller's Collected Poems—an unusually platitudinous one—implies that he is, above all, a continually developing poet. This is seriously misleading, for it neatly misses the point: he is, in the proper sense, an occasional poet—the most worthy of his time. What may have seemed like a consistent poetic development to the blurb-writer is in reality a record of the changing attitudes of a remarkably sensitive and good-hearted man. (Some modern exponents of verse woul...

Vamp Till Ready, which is the tale of a newly grown-up Fuller acquiring his Marxism, his legal career, his wife, his war and proof that he was indeed a poet, grows most naturally out of Souvenirs, which is the tale of his childhood. The tone continues to be one of laconic eloquence. The flavour of the Thirties, now so familiar to us because of its endless evocations, is given a stranger, more compelling taste because of the economical way in which he handles it. The signposts pointing from slump to call-up ...

Roy Fuller, poet as well as novelist, has in a sense pooled his resources in [The Carnal Island] in order to probe the range of questions thrown up by an encounter between an old poet and a young one, and the result is a very perceptive, often amusing, and at times sad and touching, novel. The narrative framework is deliberately slight. The young poet, James, has an assignment to persuade the 80-year-old poet, Daniel House, to compile an anthology for a publisher, and visits him in his house overlooking an ...

[In] contrast to most of his contemporaries, Mr. Fuller still believes in the unambiguous direct statement about immediate issues. [Many of the new poems collected in Epitaphs and Occasions], occasional and informal in the best sense, are concerned with the relation of the individual's integrity to the collective good; others with the positive meanings of art in a society doomed by the pressure of outside events…. [One] aspect of Mr. Fuller's recent development [is his] realization of t...

Mr. Fuller's post-war poetry has generally been that of a quiet, contemplative family man who uses the trivial happenings of domestic existence as a starting-point for an analysis of the larger horrors of modern life. His viewpoint is suburban rather than metropolitan or rural, his tone is wry, ironic and dryly critical, his mood tends to be gloomy. The experiences out of which his poetry is created are rarely beyond the reach of the ordinary commuting man: his attitude to them is deprecating, ration...

The themes which preoccupy Roy Fuller in his poetry are nakedly, indeed oppressively, active in [The Carnal Island]. Most of Fuller's verse has, in one way or another, been about the role of the poet in a society that is hostile or indifferent to him; how absurd and tragic the discrepancy between the poet's art-life and his real life, between his grand therapeutic dreams and his actual social and political impotence. Can Freud and Marx be married? That classic worry of the 1930s has continued ...

It is rare and difficult for any poet, young or old, to find a true voice; rarer and even more difficult to adopt a new one in the notoriously barren stretches of middle age. Yet this is what Roy Fuller has splendidly done in his New Poems. The voice is both true and new. It speaks from recognizably the same man as that of the Collected Poems … and Buff …, but with a directness of personal reference quite unexpected from Mr. Fuller, whose sequences of Mythological Sonnets, Meredithian Sonnets,...

The Reign of Sparrows is not quite as good as either [Brutus's Orchard or New Poems], but there is plenty in it to remind [Roy Fuller's] admirers just how varied, skilful and surprising he can be. Three opening poems in his lengthy, reflective manner (a bit Hardyesque these days in "Ghost Voice") remain rather arcane and uncomfortable after several readings; but "Sloth Moth" sees him away into a favourite later theme, the oddities and ironies of natural history; and...

['Vamp Till Ready'] takes us, roughly, from [Fuller's] time as a solicitor's articled clerk in London in the early Thirties (Fuller was 20 in 1932) up to, more or less, the present day. That is to say, through his conscripted days in the Royal Navy ('The Andrew'), postwar solicitorship with the Woolwich, Professorship of Poetry at Oxford, Governorship of the BBC, the novels and the poems…. But, as with 'Souvenirs,' although there is a ground bas...

Roy Fuller is a man of considerable distinction; he is not a genius. There is no need for me to disparage Mr Fuller, he does the job well enough himself: it is part of his persona as a writer. In his new book From the Joke Shop it produces a few moments of pathos, but nothing more. This record of ageing, written mostly at night, when thoughts of mortality are supposed to be strong, is preoccupied with death. The prospect of dying comes to Mr Fuller as a shock, the grotesqueness of old age suddenly realised....

A layer of glum senescence covers Roy Fuller's latest collection of poems [The Reign of Sparrows] like a fall of volcanic ash. There is plenty here about movement, growth and vitality, but the drift is distinctly that of an unburdened crawl towards death…. Almost the entire final section of the book is dedicated to the business of reckoning with the onset of old age. Being 65 is viewed, not, as in Auden's case, with quietly smirking triumph, but with a sense of tremulous astonishment at...

A lot of [Brutus's Orchard] is taken up with occasional poems. Most short poems are occasional, I suppose, in that they take particular and possibly trivial situations as their starting points, but to be of any importance they should also expand on these situations, giving them some larger, yet definite, place in the writer's experience. Unfortunately, with a great many of Mr. Fuller's poems, we are left where we started, contemplating some either obvious or vaguely didactic comment on ...

[In The Ruined Boys, published in the United States as That Distant Afternoon,] Mr. Roy Fuller has written a series of quiet vignettes of school life. We are subjected to no gradual gathering of momentum, to no resounding climax. The boy Bracher is taken through three terms of his life in a second-rate English boarding school, makes friends and enemies, rumbles the headmaster, and at the end learns that Mr. Percy, the master who has exercised most influence over him, will not be returning after the holidays...

["Fantasy and Fugue"] is at least as exciting and as disturbing as [Roy Fuller's first crime novel] "The Second Curtain" and by that token one of the more considerable mysteries in this or any other season. Like its predecessor it has the haunting quality of those entertainments with which Graham Greene expressed his alertness to the Thirties. But like its predecessor too Mr. Fuller's novel has its own integrity and its own expressiveness in explicating an unsettled...

[Fantasy and Fugue is a] study of the origin and consequences of a guilty obsession (the hero is sure he has killed a man, but why and how are mysteries to him almost to the end) [which] takes the reader into some extremely strange backwaters of literary London. Fay Lavington is a dreadful girl, and, in their separate ways, Clarence Rimmer, Charles Legge, and Bob Midwinter are pretty repulsive specimens, too. They are not, however, without their conversational charms … and their behavior is also mode...

"That Distant Afternoon" is a subtle and uncannily penetrating novel, and by the time we have reached its final, fascinating page we have observed something momentous: a young and very human being has taken several long strides toward maturity…. [Although] Mr. Fuller is a wit and an ironist, he respects his characters; he knows (and irrefutably demonstrates) that a boy of fourteen or fifteen is at least as complex and as worthy of concentrated attention as any adult. He also commands a ...