"The Crier by Night" is one of the most powerful and eerie poetic dramas of the supernatural that have been written in the last two decades. To me the best-known translations of Maeterlinck pale beside it.... I hold "The Riding to Lithend" his greatest achievement. To me it is like a piece of gorgeous tapestry blurred by wood-smoke and sea-mist and hung on a granite wall. The dramatic structure is knit as compact as a rock. Across the shimmering imagery of the diction blows a chill and foreboding wind of the spirit.... The verse is nobly distinguished. "King Lear's Wife" is also a notable piece of work.... It possesses convincing reality.... Again the dramatic structure satisfies completely. "Midsummer Eve" is packed with fragrant beauty ... that creeps around the heart.... The atmosphere is the important thing about this play and is unforgettable. "Laodice and Danaë" is more usual (for Bottomley, for very few other writers), but it is the work of a sure dramatic craftsman with an enthralling tale to tell.... There is a splendid artistic austerity about his work ... yet mixed with this there is an entirely full-blooded love of the earth, a delight in intensely human detail.... He has indeed displayed many gifts imperishably bright. His name should stand high in the roster of modern English verse.
The Morning Post.
The rare beauty and distinction of these works have been ungrudgingly acclaimed by many critics, but they have hitherto lacked that wider recognition for which they are indubitably destined.... But now the bringing of them together in one volume permits us all to appraise the quality of what is the most significant accomplishment of our Georgians. It is impossible to be impervious to the strength and beauty, knit together, of these dramas.... Criticism may note with admiration the unerring skill of dramatic structure; with delight the mastery of language, which constrains the simplest words to the greatest needs; with wonder the reading of the human heart.... The man who can handle character and emotion with such mastery both of language and imagination is indeed a poet.... In Mr. Bottomley the Georgian era has found an authentic voice—a veritable interpreter.
The Times Literary Supplement.
We must honour the devoted writers who keep alive the desire for the poetic drama, and none more than Mr. Gordon Bottomley.... He is a poet and justifies his use of poetic speech; he is eloquent, incisive, has a blank verse of his own which he writes with increasing mastery.... In "The Riding to Lithend" he rises with his story ... the death of Gunnar is well done; you read it breathlessly, for he makes it the death of Gunnar indeed; and even the slayers feel the greatness of it. Mr. Bottomley, in a more fortunate age, might, we think, have been a dramatic poet like Fletcher; he has Fletcher's eloquence though not his fun,... but not, of course, Fletcher's familiarity with the stage.... If he had been bred in the theatre, he might, we think, have had Fletcher's real and delightful success.
John O' London's Weekly.
The cumulative effect of a re-reading of Mr. Bottomley's work is to convince one that he is a real poet who can write real drama. In the matter of construction these plays approach perfection; the building up is masterly, and the verse is full of variety and imagination.... The finest as drama is "King Lear's Wife," though for sheer beauty and spiritual significance I should be inclined to place "Midsummer Eve" first. Only one of these plays has been acted in England. If we had a live stage they would all be acted.
The New Statesman.
Mr. Gordon Bottomley's plays are good art. There are moments in "King Lear's Wife" when he approaches greatness.... It contains passages of very rare force, and the dramatic power ... is of a very high quality. In this play and in "The Crier by Night" he recalls to us not the late Elizabethans so much as that strange uneasy genius Thomas Lovell Beddoes.... He is a purer poet, dramatically, than was Beddoes, and his song has a clearer richer quality, more imaginative, though not quite so fantastic; but he resembles Beddoes in his stern saddened preoccupations with the passing of mortals. Few plays have a greater unity of atmosphere or a more boding one than has "The Riding to Lithend." In all the plays, however, one finds a real poet who is also a real dramatist; there is little of decoration in any of the plays, and nothing of that windy seasonal rhetoric which is so common in some poetic plays.
I. B. in The Manchester Guardian.