Some writers attract faint praise. Vernon Watkins is more damned by it than most: he is the serene Watkins, walking the Gower peninsula in a cloud of unworldly Christianity, Yeats and (very) late Symbolism; he is also the worthy Watkins, the man who spent his adult life working in a bank, refusing all promotion while perfecting his poetic craft. Good behaviour and a friendship with Philip Larkin have allowed the image of Watkins as a hard-working, pleasant and largely irrelevant anachronism to prevail, and for poets and critics to forgive him, by forgetting how in the 1930s and 1940s, under the influence of Dylan Thomas, he was an eager perpetrator of New Romanticism.

LRB 9 August 2001 | PDF Download