Since you have been here I have been reading your poems with great enjoyment. The presence of philosophical, as in “The New Hope” and of such original, and at the same time perfectly natural motives as “Motherhood” is certainly a remarkable thing among younger English poets, especially when united with a command of rhythmical and verbal form like yours. The poem “Motherhood” is of course a bold one; but it expresses, as I think, with perfect purity, a thought, which all who can do so are the better for meditating on. The “Transcripts from Nature” seem to me precisely all, and no more than (and just how is the test of excellence in such things) what little pictures in verse ought to be.
Very sincerely yours,
Walter Pater.
Dear Mr. Sharp,
I have really not much to say about your poems. That you are of the tribe or order of prophets, I certainly believe. What rank you may take in that order I cannot guess. But the essential thing is that you are the thing poet, and being such I doubt much whether talk about your gift and what you ought to do with it will help you at all.
In “Motherhood” I think you touch the highest point in the volume. The “Transcripts from Nature”—some of them—give me the feel in my nerves of the place and hour you describe, I like the form but I think you have written a sufficient mass in this form, and that future rispetti ought to be rare, that is, whenever it is necessary and right to express yourself in that form. (It is harder to take in many in succession than even sonnets.) The longer poems seem to me as decisively the poetry of a poet as the others, but they seem not so successful (while admirable in many pages and in various ways).
I believe a beautiful action, beautifully if somewhat severely handled, would bring out your highest. I wish you had some heroic old Scotch story to brood over and make live while you are in Scotland.
I look forward with much interest to your Pre-Raphaelism and Rossetti.
Very sincerely yours,
Edward Dowden.