He would probably not have agreed with this assessment, and many people would question this judgement even now, for a variety of reasons. For a start, he can be criticised for his all-too-obvious reaction against modernism, and his preference for traditional verse forms. This isn’t very fair, particularly when it is recalled that the greatest modernist poet of all, William Butler Yeats, never wrote a free verse poem. Furthermore, the whole history of literature is one of renewal and reaction to what came before. Modernism was a reaction after all, and it is not fair to criticise what followed modernism historically for consciously trying to be different.