To the technical beauty of Mr. Bottomley's poetry I have not alluded. It is extraordinary; but, as in all great poetry, it is no more than the sign that the reality of things is being successfully exhibited.
Mr. John Drinkwater in "The Nature of Drama" ("Prose Papers": London, Elkin Mathews, 1917, p. 220).
I do say that the capital power of the commercialised theatre in England to-day is so great that it has been able to impose its standard on nearly all the people who are habitually in contact with its merchandise ... so that one piece of catchpenny insincerity after another is extolled by what passes for expert opinion as a valuable contribution to the great art of the dramatist, while a piece of work like Mr. Gordon Bottomley's "King Lear's Wife," which ... is for vigour of imagination, poetic eagerness, and dramatic passion not to be excelled by anything that has been put on to the English stage since the Elizabethans, is met with a clamour of ignorance ... in most cases (1915-16) we find no standard whatever being brought to the judgment of an original work of art other than a spurious morality.
Solomon Eagle in The Outlook.
The various societies which desire to regenerate the theatre talk a good deal about the poetic drama of the future, but they do not seem to take much trouble to find it.... Of Mr. Gordon Bottomley's fine plays only one, to the best of my knowledge, has yet been produced in this country.... There is certainly the possibility of a great play in their author, and one at least of them is better than any play in verse which has been staged for many years, and is likely to live longer than most of the so-called masterpieces of our time. If "Midsummer Eve" had been by Claudel, or "The Riding to Lithend" by some German (a most unlikely supposition) all the coteries would have been talking about them years ago....
"Midsummer Eve" is original, and the work of a poet.... There is fine meditative poetry in it, poetry, moreover, not grafted or glued on to its main structure, but growing out of the dialogue naturally, in an inevitable manner.... "Laodice and Danaë" is equally good reading, and it is dramatic. But none of these plays is equal to the two latest, "The Riding to Lithend" and "King Lear's Wife."...
Enough has been written about the grimness of "King Lear's Wife," the fine bursts of poetry in it, and the remarkable character of Goneril.... "The Riding to Lithend" is, up to the present, the best of Mr. Bottomley's plays; and its superiority is a superiority which, I think, would be still more evident on the stage than it is in print.... It comes straight out of an old tale; the characters are recreated and enriched.... The diction is, as a rule, perfect in its propriety and often striking in its beauty. And, above all, Gunnar is a hero, his fight a heroic fight, his courage, his generosity, his humanity (a few sentences to wife and hound are wonderfully chosen), and even his weaknesses are such as to move the heart. His fall is like the fall of all noble and fighting things; the sense of defeat comes with it, but above that a feeling of exultation. On the stage the end, I fancy, would be profoundly moving, and the fight exciting to a degree, though there is no obvious rhodomontade about it.
Mr. John Freeman in The Bookman.
This comely volume at last makes public what has been too long a fugitive and cloistered pleasure.... These five plays show the author in the most powerful exercise of his faculties. Imagination here is free and moves with growing ease, music enlarges like a splendid wind through the verse; and the common reproach of mere "poetic plays" has been avoided in these, where character and action develope as surely as music itself. Gordon Bottomley has remembered that his plays can have no life except in the activity of his characters.... Fine careless raptures alone will not produce a play like "The Riding to Lithend" ... you may quote almost any lines from this fierce Icelandic play and find that what you are reading is vital and essential to the expression of character and action. And in this poetry, too ... the beautiful images flow in and out with the ease of light on water; the rhythms have the natural movement of thought, and the secret discipline of masculine habit. "King Lear's Wife" will be familiar to many readers, but to others it will come with the delicious shock of a new creation.... The new play is a beam of light crossing the darkness of the old. Few passages of modern verse reach the beauty of Goneril's hunting-narration; and it is no isolated beauty.
Mr. William Rose Benèt in The Literary Review of the New York Evening Post.