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Malcolm writes: " I've often thought there would be an interesting book to write about poets round about the middle of the century who rejected their early volumes: Larkin ditched The North Ship, WS Graham expressed some regret at his own early style (I seem to remember - Matthew?) and to a lesser extent John Ashbery has distanced himself from The Tennis Court Oath while Edwin Morgan's early poetry seems miles away from the work collected in and after The Second Life. " Almost as if what was the exception in the earlier part of the century (Stevens) becomes the norm later. Not just changes of style, but an enormous gulf somewhere in the middle. I'd agree with Malcolm over EM and the change of style around _The Second Life_ [though even there the 'earlier' "What is 'Paradise Lost' REALLY about?" tends to stick out]. But rather than rejecting the earlier work, Edwin Morgan almost goes out of his way to get it back into print in the Carcanet Collected(s), and even includes token poems from _Dies Irae_ and _Cathkin Braes_ at the start of the _Selected_. The anomalous case is _The Whittrick_ -- better than DI and CB, but not really like anything in SL or later. Almost as if this is a path not followed ... Though (I'm free-associating a bit now) there could be a curious reverse-link between Morgan the Second and Stevens the First. _Harmonium_ has a lock on the-writer-at-forty (in "La Monocle de Mon Oncle"), while Morgan was almost exactly forty when SL was published. Robin