[Steve Bucknell]

This is Martin Seymour-Smith’s brief assessment of Gascoyne from his monumental Guide to Modern World Literature. Papermac.1986:

“David Gascoyne (1916) was more directly influenced by surrealism than either Barker or Thomas or, indeed, any other English poet. Gascoyne’s first book of poetry Roman Balcony appeared when he was sixteen; his novel Opening Day followed in 1933 when he was seventeen. A Short History of Surrealism (19360 was published when he was twenty. When he published Poems 1937-42 he had reached his maturity, although he was not yet thirty. Influenced by Jouve and by the early manifestation of the philosophy of existentialism Gascoyne is a most unusual phenomenon in English poetry; yet his “Europeanness” does not give his poetry an un-English flavour. On the contrary he remains the most English of poets, a genuine visionary writing in the tradition of Blake and Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s “The Woodspurge”. His early surrealism, where successful, achieves innocence. Unfortunately, however, the later stage in Gascoyne’s development is wanting: his later poetry has the strength of sincerity, but is grey, defeated and lachrymose:

Not from a monstrance silver-wrought
But from the tree of human pain
Redeem our sterile misery,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
That man’s long journey through the night
Might not have been in vain.

This is too deeply felt and dignified to be platitudinous; but it is disappointing in the light of the earliest poetry, and lacks real energy. “