Man's inhumanity to man:
his legacy of grief and pain,
worse than the tiger or the lion,
    constricts the heart
and makes us often 'howling' run
    to our safe art

O see Man as he really is
in all his frightened nakedness

In The Human Face, an impassioned poem-essay in Burns's most celebrated poetic form, Iain Crichton Smith evokes the democratic spirit of Burns in an age starved of tolerance and clarity. This is the poet's most ambitious and risky poem to date. It has the humane scope and sweep of the major poems of MacDiarmid and MacLean, and it is by their measure that Smith must now be appraised. Douglas Dunn wrote in The Times Literary Supplement of 'that purity, that touch of originality, which marks poetry at the limits of intuition and imagining.' Robert Nye in The Times declared of the Collected Poems: 'Crichton Smith's net is quite wide, but its meshes are splendidly small, and he is always catching more than he probably intended.'