In Brecht’s poetry, which is extraordinarily unintroverted and unselfconscious, the poet is a superior reporter whose canny, almost prosaic, didacticism nevertheless slips across into poetry. There is terseness and irony, matter-of-fact understatement, powerful use of anticlimax, and an unblinking, almost lidless, lucidity of outlook. And then, out of nowhere, a sudden touch of heart-wrenching lyricism. Then on again, as if nothing had happened...

As might be expected, the work is uneven, especially in the rhymed translations, which, to be sure, present enormous problems. Willett himself took on many of these rhymed translations, and handled them, on the whole, creditably.

That Brecht never felt sorry for himself—hardly ever was even interested in himself—was one of his great virtues, but the virtue was rooted in something else, which was a gift and was, like all such gifts, part blessing and part curse... There is not a shred of sentimentality left in Brecht's beautiful and beautifully precise definition of a refugee: "Ein Bote des Unglücks" ("a messenger of ill tidings"). A messenger's message, of course, does not concern himself... This ingenious, more than ingenious, phrase "messengers of ill tidings" for refugees and exiles may illustrate the great poetic intelligence of Brecht, that supreme gift of condensation which is the prerequisite of all poetry...

There are a great many things that are permitted to an ox but not to Jove; that is, not to those who are a bit like Jove—or, rather, are blessed by Apollo. Hence the bitterness of the old saying cuts both ways, and the example of "poor B.B.," who never wasted a shred of pity on himself, may teach us how difficult it is to be a poet in this century or at any other time.