20–16871
As an introduction to this book of poems Mr Untermeyer reprints “A note on the poetry of love” from the New Republic. He comments on the artificiality of the love poetry of the preceding age and notes that in our day there is a tendency to return “to the upright vigor, the wide and healthy curiosity” of our earlier ancestors, the Elizabethans. Among the poems of the book are: The new Adam, Hands, Asleep, Summer storm, A marriage, Wrangle, Equals, Supplication, The eternal masculine, Windy days, The embarrassed amorist, Words for a jig, Disillusion, The prodigal.
“There is nothing about love or woman in this collection, except it be in the verses called ‘The wise woman,’ that is new in love poetry, and there is many a mood and theme that has been both artistically and emotionally better expressed by any number of poets in the past ‘two centuries.’” W: S. Braithwaite
− + Boston Transcript p4 D 31 ’20 1000w
Reviewed by Babette Deutsch
Dial 70:89 Ja ’21 380w
“There is in this recent work of Mr Untermeyer’s a note that is singular in American poetry. It shows a writer who has become curious about the soul.” H. S. Gorman
+ Freeman 2:332 D 15 ’20 320w
“Mr Untermeyer is casual, as he promised, and flippant, and frank, and dutifully vulgar; but seldom is his effect other than that of an agile pen tracing a facile passion.”