-- by Francis Steegmuller

This carefully contrived book is likely to please best only those readers who know least about Apollinaire, but who are delighted to dip into a nicely, often spicily, written story about a fin de siècle Villon who smoked opium, palled around with Picasso, Matisse and Braque and (in 1911) got arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa.

Time, November 29, 1963.

-- by Aileen Ward

Aileen Ward, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence, is briefer than Biographer Bate, less searching, more wrapped up in the psychology of such things as Keats's ambivalent feeling toward women.

Time, October 25, 1963.

--  by Walter Jackson Bate

Bate sometimes detours through academic bogs, especially when he is taking the reader by the hand through every well-known poem Keats ever wrote.

Time, October 25, 1963.

-- by John Collier

Collier has spent his 40-year literary career variously in England, the French Riviera and Hollywood. He has long believed that the cinema has not taken full advantage of its potential for fantasy, and he has thought about Paradise Lost as a film for years. "Milton was one of the greatest science-fiction and space-travel writers," he explains. "Satan flies through the whole universe, after all." 

Time, June 25, 1973.

With other machines also turning to the muse, there is the chance of a whole new school of poetry growing up.

Time, May 25, 1962

e.e. cummings -- Obituary

The epitaph that cummings probably would have liked best had nothing to do with the critical ranking of poets. It was spoken by Fellow Poet Archibald MacLeish: "There are very few people who deserve the word poet. cummings was one of them."

Time, September 14, 1962.

In the opening address at the National Poetry Festival in Washington (the first in U.S. history), Randall Jarrell surveyed American poetry and the poets of this century and delivered himself of some tart judgments.  Time, November 9, 1962.

W.H. Auden -- Obituary

In 1966, long before his death, Auden's best epitaph was written by British Critic Cyril Connolly: "Auden was for many of us the last poet we learnt by heart."

Time, October 8, 1973.