[Like] Wordsworth, Smith has obscured his progress as a poet by arranging [Collected Poems] subjectwise, not chronologically. The book is divided into five sections, the opening poem of each nicely chosen to announce the section's mood or theme. Though one's chief curiosity about a poet who has reached the stage of his collected poems thus remains unsatisfied, it seems to me that the shape of the book comes off completely. Smith is above all a clever, literary and fastidious poet, and what, looked at over the years, might have seemed too fragmentary or eclectic in his work, is given by this arrangement a cumulative and intellectually stimulating effect. This is seen very clearly in Part 2, a section of "imagist" poems. We take these more as evidence of the poet's interest in the scrupulous finding of accurate words for the accurate observation of nature than, as might easily have...