Middleton's sceptical modernism, his multiple perspectives and self-reflexive signification, struggle with the other key element in his work, the aspiration towards an original unity of the sort that seemed available to Romantic poets like Holderlin: so his poem's attempt to reconcile opposites and site themselves on the threshold where one pole turns into the other. Objects waver on the edge of loss, presence on the edge of absence:

    Various woods keep
    Recomposing themselves; nothing holds
    In the fire, the fire is always
    Less than it was, the fire -

    Expulsion
    Of old smells, new intangible horizons
    Does not hear through its decay,
    Calling in the cold
    Rain, the little owl, one note,
    Over and over

Middleton raises fascinating and complex questions, but at the same time provides ready poetic enjoyment in the form of these lovely rhythms and images.  In Middleton's work, by contrast, the refusal of definitive closure is sustained throughout his work, and it is that model which has prove influential for many of the most challenging poets of the generations since both Hamilton and Middleton.