COLLECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM EMPSON

A little volume of high class verse by an English poet of the modern school. This book includes besides the contents of Poems (1935) and The Gathering Storm (1940) three poems written during the war and one long poem called Letter IV. Notes on these poems accompany the text at the end of the volume. The verse is adept, polished, witty. Its irony and metaphysics and many of its topics are modern, as is some of its obscurity. Yet on the whole it is not too extreme; and the verse, Just a Smack at Auden, which is extremely amusing caricature if not art, shows that the poet's trend is against what he considers nihilism. An interesting addition to a shelf of modern poetry, for those interested in watching its developments.