John F Deane selects a representative core of his work. He emerges as a poet for whom the old verities retain some of their truth and the accelerating fin-de-siecle is not an unmitigated good. He explores the ways in which an individual copes in imagination and in life with pain (over the loss of a young wife) in the context of an inherited and not always answering religious faith. In a world of material progress, of wars and their consequences, of spiritual loss and in humanity, how does religious faith survive, and can it grow and intensify? Does it legitimize, or chain down the poem?