Such a dialogue with language expresses itself through language itself, for the poetic vocabulary must be refined to its essentials and used with a full awareness of its limitations. Language, therefore, becomes both an element of the experiment and the final, contrived solution. Words themselves become new objects and assume physical properties. As in a photograph where the foreground is in focus and the background is blurred, Smith's poems invite the reader to consider how the aesthetic balance of objects changes in different environments and situations. Indeed, in Smith's poetry there often seems to be an almost utopian wish for the well-wrought urn of classical antiquity.
Symbols are timeless, for they are both young and old, of the present and of the past.
The poetic landscape goes beyond temporal reality, transcends the world we know, and becomes a theoretical model of aesthetic harmony. To view such poems as merely derivative, as some critics have done, is to ignore the distinctive quality of these experiments in verse. And as in a carefully structured painting, the artist places images against a deliberately undefined background. Yet there remains a static quality to the poem, a factor that limits the reader's emotional identification with the work. Although Smith may well be more modernist than imagist, and hence closer to T.S. Eliot than to Williams, the contrast emphasizes the lack of life apparent in many of the poems.