The Poems of Martin Seymour Smith

Martin Seymour-Smith (1928-1998) was in the line of English poetry that includes Thomas Hardy and Robert Graves two poets whose biographies he wrote (he had known Graves since the age of fourteen, and revered Hardy). He was also a proponent of a phenomenological poetry rooted in experience, and an advocate of such experimental foreign-language poets as the Peruvian Cesar Vallejo. For younger poets, he points a way to go that is beyond the usual territories mapped out by Modernism and tradition. As well as a biographer, he was a brilliant critic the Samuel Johnson of his day, according to Anthony Burgess. His massive Guide to Modern World Literature included many original translations, several of which are collected here for the first time. In the critical realm, his combative instincts as a former bantam-weight boxer never left him. But the main theme of his poetry is love complex, often destructive, always mysterious which aches to know what is known only, or is unknowable.