“The whole work is undistinguished and dull. It is all padded out.”
| − + | Acad. 72: 603. Je. 22, ’07. 280w. |
“There are some fairly effective ‘curtains,’ but the blank verse is generally monotonous and rich in commonplaces.”
| + − | Ath. 1907, 1: 724. Je. 15. 360w. |
“In this volume Mr. Coutts has surprised us. A poet he was known to be; a lyric poet of some intensity and much art; a philosophic poet whose work was unified by a coherent, if undogmatic, faith, and expressed in language as simple as it was profound. The discovery that he is also a dramatic poet comes unexpected.”
| + | Lond. Times. 6: 180. Je. 7, ’07. 870w. |
“The medium of the whole—idylls and playlets—is blank verse, whereof the quality at times is excellent. The inspiration, in spite of the form, is perhaps rather Kipling than Tennyson, and the playlets are better than the idylls.”
| + | N. Y. Times. 12: 504. Ag. 17, ’07. 640w. |
“Mr. Coutts’s poems, while they are smooth and flowing and show now and then passages of much beauty or of poetic fervor, are weak and pale when tested beside the Tennysonian idylls.”