“The most thoroughly imbued with the classic mood of the younger American poets is Louis V. Ledoux. In him rings a genuine passion; no false simulation; no reflection of a glamour that is remote by association, or is the thin echo of other imaginative voices.... Beside the beauty of the verse, stately and rich in its calm melodic simplicity, there is envisaged a feeling for the deeper springs of life.”—Boston Transcript.
“This lyrical drama comes from the pen of one of the finest of our young modern poets.... With a strength and simplicity that puts to shame the diffuseness and depravity of the new writers of vers libre ... this author writes a play less sensational than his previous ‘Yzdra’ but more sustained.... ‘Eleusis’ is Hellenic in the subject and in the beauty of its proportion and harmony ... and several of its lyrics are marvelous songs in rhythmic phrase and in underlying thought.”—The Bellman (Minneapolis).
“There must be thousands of readers who would give this new poem a warm and grateful welcome if only the rare quality of it could be brought properly to their attention.... This does not signify necessarily that the poem is an unqualified masterpiece, but it indicates the presence of a quality that has always been present in the grand style when the grand style has compelled itself to endure.”—The New York Evening Sun.
The Canterbury Pilgrims: A Comedy
By PERCY MACKAYE
Decorated cloth, gilt top, 210 pages, 12mo, $1.25; boards, $1.00
The principal characters are Geoffrey Chaucer; Alisoun, the wife of Bath; Madame Eglantine, the prioress, and Johanna, Marchioness of Kent. The time of the action is in April, 1387, and the scenes are the Tabard Inn, Southwark, another tavern on the road, and the exterior of Canterbury Cathedral. The story, which is entertaining from first to last, has to do with Chaucer’s adventure with the wife of Bath and his love for the prioress.
“Every line of The Canterbury Pilgrims seems to have been wrought with infinite pains. The play possesses splendid literary qualities—and it is actable.”—Dramatic Mirror.
“For a twentieth century author to take the characters of Chaucer’s famous stories and give them parts in a new comedy in verse, is a bold, nay, a perilous undertaking. But Mr. Percy MacKaye has carried it through with a large measure of success. He has drunk deep of the great Father of English poetry’s well, so that the comedy’s delightfully quaint language has the real Chaucerian ring. With much skill he portrays the pilgrims, picturing their respective failings and virtues so deftly that they appeal as strongly to modern taste as they did to our ancestors, yet preserving generally the mediæval tone.... Specially amusing is Friar Hubert, a jovial, mischievous rogue, whose drollery is irresistible.”—Oxford Chronicle.
“Throughout the play the characters of these two most innocent lovers [Chaucer and the prioress] are maintained with exquisite humor and feeling for life. Outside of the covers of Shakespeare it would be hard to find anything of the kind at once more original and more nearly on Shakespeare’s level.”—New York Times.