I have sat on these books longer than is reasonable for a review, yet have to confess that I am not satisfied with the readiness of what follows. I got the Porter first, but receiving the Johnston thought that they in some ways offered similar difficulties, perhaps similar rewards, to the reader, and that it might be neat to review them together.

It was probably not a rewarding notion, and not surprisingly, I suppose, comparison works to Johnston’s disadvantage. The grounds of comparison are simple: both are highly literate, ‘intellectual’ poets, both obscure and/or difficult; and both are modernists (I mean by this not much more than that both allow idiosyncratic movements of thought, of diction and above all of verse).