"Classical" is the word most often used to describe Herbert's poetry, both in Poland and among readers who know his work in the West. The word is necessarily ambiguous. T. S. Eliot often appealed to the traditions of classicism, and implied, as did Ezra Pound in his way, that his own poetry endorsed them. But the interior of Eliot s poetry is deeply personal, full of romantic secrets and intimacies. These are notably lacking in Herbert. Not that Herbert is impersonal: he presents a Horatian simplicity and openness, a temperament like that of a traveler or classical scholar...

As the translators point out, Herbert is not classical in the sense of using traditional meters or rhymes; his poetry is more like a spare form of conversation, obviously depending a good deal on word order and on the subtle use of cliche. Well-known poems like "Apollo and Marsyas" and "Elegy of Fortinbras" are no doubt much funnier in the original. In English they depend rather too much on the points they make... Instead of submerging itself in the past and in its milieu, with all the helplessness of which some modern poetry makes a virtue, Herbert's poetry detaches itself into a thinner air, almost that dimension of logic and mathematics in which recent Polish scholarship has specialized.