Lee, Laurie - Fleming MacLiesh (review date 21 December 1947)

Fleming MacLiesh (review date 21 December 1947)

SOURCE: "Palsied Apples Fall," in The New York Times Book Review, December 21, 1947, p. 8.

[In the mixed review of The Sun My Monument below, MacLiesh faults the uneven lyrical quality of the collection.]

Poe refused to publish somebody's poem on the ground that the disparity between the good lines and the bad was so incredible that the good must have been stolen. By that criterion a fair amount of his own poetry would have been suspect. If Mr. Lee is certainly not open to the charge, nevertheless the mixture of the excellent and of the perfectly terrible in his verse is equally baffling; so thoroughly are they mingled that there is scarcely a poem in [The Sun My Monument] which can be dismissed altogether and scarcely one which succeeds as a whole or represents any kind of sustained achievement.

Both virtues and faults have their source in his employment of images. In...

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