WHAT MAKES Seymour’s 1937 first book, ‘VERSE’ a startling and thoughtful contemporary collection (and one of the prime values of good poetry is its ability to stimulate deep echoes of thought on many levels, rather than simply recycling sentimental feeling) is the way in which his language puts priority on the primary concerns of a human identity, which, in turn, nurtures and strengthens a sensitively civilized national identity in individual local readers.
We see evidence of this in the first poem of ‘Verse’, titled ‘Turn These Pages’, which is addressed to a lady/lover, but in no way alienates each reader’s interest. In this sense, we are reminded of Walt Whitman’s profound opening lines of ‘Leaves of Grass’, which unify poet and reader:
‘I celebrate myself/And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you’
Seymour’s lines at the centre of ‘Turn These Pages’ evoke aspects of his national identity in the most quotidian manner, as though living in then British Guiana was as normal as living anywhere else experienced in the obviously foreign dominated tradition of literature consumed, or films seen, or music heard. The poet tells us how the words of the poem he is writing came to be written:
‘They came upon him as the burden of a breeze,
Slow lingering warm music through the deep-drugged hours of night,
The dim dreary holiness of cloistered trees,
Faint sparkle of laughing wavelets, and the magic charm of the sight
Of the tall white sails far out to sea’

Poetic authenticity
The broken cadence and lack of metrical consistency here is not subjected to a borrowed stylistic order, but finds its own order of poetic description and tone, which puts Seymour in 1937 in the company of some of the best internationally accomplished poets of 2011. In a Guyanese context, authenticity in poetics is linked to national identity, which makes the use of English subtly different from the grammatical and phonetic tone of standard Anglo poets, from Shakespeare to Eliot (an American who preferred to become an English conservative).
This is obvious, since local Guyanese poets like Seymour, true to themselves, will not assume poetic standards of language which are really native to the English tongue, tone, and diction, and their obvious resulting manifestations of ‘feeling’; unless, of course, such Guyanese are themselves preserved English people. The true Guyanese poet carries within him or herself the secreted influences of other non-Anglo languages, whether from Native America, Africa, India, China, and CONTINENTAL European cultures long rooted in Guyana, such as Dutch, French, Portuguese, even some Danish, German, and Italian, whether as a preserved ethnicity, or a racially mixed one.
Added to that, as said before, the surrounding local tropical environment, both socially and geographically, will not naturally adjust to the prefabricated rules of an adopted tongue, but shape it toward its own inner and outward reality.

Local sensual poetry
Seymour is also the first Guyanese poet to revel in local female sensuality and sexuality. This point is instructive, since he was a devout husband, father of six children, and the poetry of his first collection shows how this enjoyment and commitment to family was rooted in a frank and healthy extroverted attraction to local females in their tropical national context.
Since his first 1937 collection, he comprehended how various values emanated from contemplating the female as poetic muse. In ‘The Eternal Female’, a beautiful poem from his first collection which traces how sensual beauty is passed from mother to daughter, we hear these lines:
‘I watched the girl go walking by/And saw the pliant rounded thigh/Outline her torso’s symmetry./The body’s rhythm I could see/The swaying hips, the rippling breasts/In whose deep hollow some man rests/A love-kissed head. One day I felt/ Those shapely limbs would writhe and melt/In love’s hot anguish’
By the 1960s, Seymour felt free enough to write ‘Song For Lulu’ in  simple local demotic language:
‘Lulu, you really really nice…/Is where your mother find you, nuh?/Tell me girl, is where?/What can that mini hide?/Perfect knees, love worthy thighs/And small waist as a guide/All men would long to hug those knees/They’d  feel so warm inside’
In that same period, he also wrote ‘Love Poem’, which surprises with its blend of social convention and erotic inspiration. He writes:
‘To the legs of a woman/Unmentionable in polite society/These well turned pillars of delight/Float the rich currency of our love/Take her to church, to market and to bed/And set out compass to the yearning point/In instant poetry/Within our inner space/The arithmetic of our desire/Accelerates/When the young shapely girls walk by /In ambulatory aesthetics’

Social influence
Apparently, Seymour’s various early chapbooks of verse, self-published locally, were quite popular among Guyanese singles and couples in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, at least, when reading along with cinema-going (to great classic films)generated a calm, sophisticated sensuality, and civilized quality to national identity and life, sorely lacking today, which an older generation remembers.
Seymour, worthy of being called the Father of National Identity in Guyanese creative writing, nurtured the talents of Guyana’s first writers who rose to international status from a home base; writers like Edgar Mittlelholzer, Wilson Harris, Martin Carter, Ivan Van Sertima and others who were launched via Guyana’s greatest literary quarterly, ‘Kyk’over-al’, which ‘AJ’ co-edited.
The fact that these writers emerged quite ably and uniquely in tune with contemporary Guyanese life in the capital, the villages, and the wild interior without the aid of writers workshops, university courses in literature, or national prize committees is evidence of the power of national identity as a particular AND universal source for generating powerful creative literature.