Andrew Young, at once the most accessible and secretive of modern poets, was born at Elgin in Scotland on April 29, 1885. The appearance of The Poetical Works of Andrew Young, edited by the poet’s daughter Alison Young and her husband Edward Lowbury, is an apt celebration of his centenary year.[1] The collection is a model of painstaking accuracy and thoughtful arrangement and supersedes the Complete Poems of 1974. Not only have the editors ordered the poems into a more cohesive and logical pattern, but they include work not to be found in earlier versions of Young’s collected poems. It seems unlikely that they have missed anything of even minor importance.

Tennyson was still at work when Young was born. As a student Young was to mourn the death of Swinburne; and he was an exact contemporary of D. H. Lawrence. Yet he lived Long enough—since he lived until 1971—to be writing after the death of Dylan Thomas. In the 1960s, visiting an Oxford bookshop, he was amused to hear a student declare that he was about “to lead the way back to Auden.” He should have been a poet whose work was considered alongside that of the War Poets—he served himself in the war of 1914-18—and there is indeed some resemblance between the poems of Young and those of Edward Thomas. But his firm unwillingness to show his work to any but the smallest audience—his wife, a very few friends—meant that he was in the