+ Boston Transcript p11 Ap 24 ’20 1550w
Reviewed by Malcolm Cowley
Dial 68:621 My ’20 1600w
“He knows the secret of the clean pentameter, he is distinct and clever and casual; yet there exists no feelable personality behind his lines. It is not required that he have intellectual drive or spiritual mounting-power: it merely is required that he show some sort of intellectual edge and awareness. He does that nowhere in ‘Picture show.’” M. V. D.
− + Nation 110:855 Je 26 ’20 160w
“Now we have ‘Picture show,’ a vigorous answer to those who feared that Sassoon had ‘written himself out’ or had begun to burn away in his own fire. The same outrage and loathing of war is in the new poems but a darker restraint is here; an emotion remembered not so much in tranquility as in irony. One of the most rousing of his recent poems. Aftermath, might well be the title of this volume, so firmly does it balance and round off his trilogy.” L: Untermeyer
+ New Repub 22:37 Mr 3 ’20 950w
“There is a mass of the verse that is heavy and halting—far too large a mass for so small a book. More careful pruning hereafter will lift the worth of his collections amazingly.” Clement Wood
+ − N Y Call p10 Je 20 ’20 250w
“In this book Mr Sassoon describes warfare just as he did in his two earlier books. But the last lyric in ‘Picture-show,’ [Every one sang,] is, perhaps, the very loveliest of all the songs written to welcome peace.”