There are few poets whose work keeps well over a generation; Smith is one of them, and in my view [his collected poems] places him clearly among the more memorable lyric poets writing in our time, not merely in Canada, but in the whole English-speaking world…. [Smith's] gathering of the poems according to manner and mood rather than time emphasises his remarkable sustenance of both emotional intensity and the lapidary craftsmanship he has always sought,

          … as hard
         And as smooth and as white
         As a brook pebble cold and unmarred …

Smith, in fact, is a poet little bound by time or place. Even the poems he wrote during the Thirties … are remarkably undated; there is nothing of the comradely fustiness that nowadays stales so much of the early Spender or Day Lewis. Indeed, if there is anything that Smith retains to place him in the period through which...