251 But it is "In Retrospect" which proves more clearly that a breakthrough has been madeo Here Ezeki'el's new voice rings out, clear and trenchant: You might as well be locked in a cage and I the visitor to feed you there with cheapest nuts (I call them thoughts) for all the difference it seems to make. No, it is not the fault of the cafe, it is not, believe me, the time or place but the haphazard destinies, yours and mine, that dose us ino o , . In this poem^ the rhythm moves with the mind and feelings, the line-breaks and the syntax play with and against each other, the voice is personal, dramatic and strong, sensitive to nuances of feeling and attitude and to wide tonal coloringo Nowhere do we find the arbitrary literariness which characterises Ezekiel's earlier work. The short lines, the sinewy free verse, the flexibility of syntax and tone are here perfectly appropriate, assuming into themselves without strain the impulse of the experience and allowing it to find its own shape, its own potencyo Comparing "In Retrospect" with, say, "Art Lecture" or "Poetry Reading" is to compare two utterly different kinds of technical constructs, two completely different approaches to experience. It is not within the scope of this paper to consider what Nissim Ezekiel has been writing since the publication of The Exact Vame; suffice to say it demonstrates the consolidation and development of the new technical freedom he gained with such difficulty in that collection,. His own voice, once liberated from formal shackles, has continued to strengthen and deepen, modifying itself perfectly to areas of experience ranging from the mystical to the most realistically social. His new technical ability is an instrument of power and confidence, capable of many dimensions of tonal variation. Above all, it is his -w? instrument. The Exact Name is the record of a revolution in an important poet's technique where he learns, with much difficulty, to abandon styles inherited from others and to create his own style for his own purposes. Some poets write better in traditional forms than in free forms. It is my contention that this is not the case with Nissim Ezekiel, who is rarely completely comfortable with regular meter and rhyme and uses it too rigidly and inflexibly, often avowing it to dominate and distort his content. His discarding of these forms was clearly not easy, and the problems are obvious in the transitional poems of this volume, but the break was essential to his development as a poet and it '"s in T^ie Exact Name that the dramatic breakthrough occurs o