Marianne Moore

“ In his essay on Poetic Diction, Robert Bridges says, "the higher the poet's command of diction, the wider may be the field of his Properties; . . . and this is a very practical point, if a writer with no command of imaginative diction, should use such Properties as are difficult of harmonization, he will discredit both the Properties and the Diction." Despite the fact that Mr Lindsay's properties are abundant and often harmonious as in the fantasy of the gipsies ”

“ Then when the ratcatcher finds that the prince will marry her only in the event that she can be made natural, in order to effect a retransformation, he is obliged to relinquish to the gnome his last penny. The White Doe maintaining throughout the image of a creature springing this way and that across a narrow forest stream, A Capful of Moonshine with its theme of the man who wished to know 'how one gets to see a fairy," The Gentle Cockatrice monumentally patient despite a recurring desire to identify its tail, and The Man Who Killed the Cuckoo, are tales one does not forget. ”

“ Mr Lindsay says; "practically every copy will be first opened on the lap of some person . . . trying to follow me as I recite as one follows the translation of the opera libretto." He is not to be refuted. There is a perhaps not very exact analogy between him in his rôle of undismayed, national interpreter, and a certain young eagle conveyed by American naval officers to the Philippines, styled "an American rooster," and pitted invariably with mortal consequence against Philippine gamecocks. ”

“ Also, evolving from an affection for the child mind and perhaps from a wish not to labour the matter, we have from time to time a kind of diminutive conversation as of an adult in the nursery, which is death to the illusion of make-believe. ”

“ THE outstanding impression made by Mr Lindsay's collected poems is that the author pities the fallen, deplores misunderstandings, and is saddened that the spirit should so often be at the mercy of the body. One cannot but revere his instinctive charity and determination to make a benevolent ordering of the universe possible. One knows that it is not an assumed attitude which leads Mr Lindsay to say:
"I want live things in their pride to remain. ”

“ Factory windows are always broken.
Somebody's always throwing bricks,
are expertly captivating. Lincoln is not added to, but he is not travestied in Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight; there is glory in the conception of. ”

“ Mohammed, St Francis, Dante, Columbus, Titian, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Napoleon, Darwin, Lincoln, Emerson, Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Socrates. Like paintings in public buildings of the world's cultural and scientific progress, such groups sacrifice impact to inclusiveness. ”

“ Some of Mr Lindsay's work would lead one to infer that "a man is out on three wide balls but walks on four good strikes." The literary reader tends not to be compensated by moral fervour for technical misapprehensions, but there is life in any kind of beauty and in these poems avoidance of grossness and the entirely vengeful, is fortifying. Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket is full of contagious vigour:
"I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. ”

“ A wind of wooing blows,"
unconsciously to Mr Lindsay no doubt, but suicidally, recall Swinburne.
Although it was not intended that the poems should be read to oneself, they will, on occasion, be so read, and so surely as they are it is inevitable that the author will in certain respects be presented amiss. Certain repetitions suggest the pleonasm of the illiterate preacher who repeats a phrase in order to get time to formulate another:
"Love is not velvet, not all of it velvet" ”