A J M Smith Romantic Exuberance

Three literary movements-romanticism, modernism and post modernism-mingle and merge in Smith's poetry. His poems parade a strange mishmash of mediaeval and the modern, and renew the template of the old renaissance myths with newfangled revisionist flourishes. In the romantic-modernist dialectics, his austerity is in part a reaction against his exuberant self. This divided sensibility is the hub of his poetry.