The poet John Heath-Stubbs is eighty this year, and the publication of the essays of several decades is, in a sense, a birthday tribute; they go as far back as 1945, when he cannot have been long out of Oxford. During the war years he was a contemporary there of Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes, David Wright, Michael Hamburger and Philip Larkin, a distinguished roster by any standard. Heath-Stubbs might conveniently be called a Neo-Romantic, and though he was never a member of the so-called Apocalypse group, he was temporarily closer to Dylan Thomas than to Auden. This personal bent has not circumcised his sympathies, since the poets he writes about with measured admiration include Dryden, Swift, Pope, George Crabbe, even Thomas Grey. He appoints Shelly essentially a Symbolist (thereby agreeing with the young Yeats) and is prepared to treat Landor's long narrative poem Gebir with unfashionable respect. To Tennyson he notes: "He was not a dynamic, creative thinker, but intellectually feminine by temperament." There are also essays on Pound And Elliot and Hart Crane, and though it is hard to share Heath-Stubbs's enthusiasm for Charles Williams (now almost forgotten0 the essays on Tasso and Leopardi should prove rewarding even to those who know no Italian. (Incidentally, someone should republish his own translations of Leopard which still seem to me the best in English).