THERE is no outstanding poet among the eight who received
the Festival awards nor, considering that their average age is 43, can one say that they promise to add any future greatness to English poetry. Each in his way is accomplished, and each traditional ; for six of them tradition stops short of Auden, and for two extend; to a conservative uie of modern idiom. Many who are not at home with contemporary poetry will like Clive Sansom's set of poems, faintly remi- niscent of Browning, in which one after another the " Witnesses " of the Gospel story describe what they saw and felt, from Mary down to the owner of the donkey on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem. There is room for such honest poetry alongside the more private and idiosyncratic composi- tions that one finds in the little magazines. In another restricted field, the topographical, Robert Conquest succeeds in conveying the individuality of landscapes from Arctic to Mediterranean. He is the most capable of the eight in the use of single words, the others all, in defiance of, contemporary practice, relying rather on the cumulative effect of paragraph and stanza. The most ambitious, G. B. Walker, writes a conversa- tion piece 70 pages long, which would be improved were it submitted to a more
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