Studies of Contemporary Poets

MARY. Not yours, nor his, nor mine. 'Tis not the fault of floods to drown, nor fire To burn and shrivel--no, nor beasts to bite, Nor frosts to kill the flowers--not the fault, O...

God of the Irish Protestant, Lord of our proud Ascendancy, Soon there'll be none of us extant, We want a few plain words with thee. Thou know'st our hearts are always set On wha...

That, with its quaint strange setting and its suggestion of a guilty love story, is a thing to linger over for its own sake, apart from its apparent isolation. Nor do we fully r...

Occasionally, however, and especially in the longer poems, the regular recurrence of the iamb is a little monotonous. Then a wish just peeps out that Mr Davies were more venturo...

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass. You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass; Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds...

The format of Mr Hodgson's published work is almost as interesting as the poetry itself--and that is saying a good deal. For all of his poetry that matters (there is an earlier,...

That, however, is the triumphant ecstasy of a moment. More often he is preoccupied with the duality in human nature, and in "An Escape" there is a fine simile of the struggle:

That defect does not appear in "The Last Abbot," which is also engaged upon the thought of the universal soul. Here an old monk, knowing that he is drawing near the end of life,...

The dramatic sense is clearly operative there. Here is an instinct which perceives the kinetic values of things; which seizes unerringly upon the stuff of drama, and, contemplat...

In reading this poem, and in others too, one is struck by the hold which the real world has upon our poet. It is a surprising fact in one of so speculative a turn, and is the cl...

Out of this arise the curiously contrasted elements of Mr Masefield's poetry. For, as in life itself, and particularly in life that is full and sound, there is here a perpetual...

That comes directly out of life, and the confidence and sincerity of it are a result. The poet, become aware of the prompting of genius, loyally follows its leading through the...

Fine as they are, however, the plays do not completely represent the poet's dramatic gift. And when we note the comic elements of two or three pieces which are tucked away in th...

The later work cannot be so readily illustrated: it is at once subtler and stronger, and depends more upon the effect of the whole than upon any single part. But for the sake of...

Mr Masefield and "John Presland"; Mr John Lane for the work of Mr Abercrombie and Mrs Woods; Messrs Sidgwick and Jackson for the work of Miss Macaulay and Rupert Brooke; Mr A. C...

The tenderness and delicacy of verse like that might mislead us. We might suppose that the qualities of Mrs Naidu's work were only those which are arbitrarily known as feminine....

We see what follows in the closing scenes as a fulfilment of that prayer. Nelto takes the boat to meet Gwyllim, intending to row him over to the false light that she herself has...