Reese, Lizette Woodworth - Harriet Monroe (review date 1924)
Harriet Monroe (review date 1924)
SOURCE: “Faint Perfume,” in Poetry, Vol. 23, No. VI, March, 1924, pp. 341-42.
[In the following review of Wild Cherry, Monroe argues that while Reese's poems are effective, she too often relies on Victorian mannerisms.]
Soft scented poems are these, delicately frail and fine, sprung from a shy and isolated soul; an expression of wistfulness, of the ache of smothered emotions. They are carefully studied, they don’t try to say or do anything original; but they sing, with musical taste and precision, a clear pure little minor tune all in the same key.
Mostly they are simply written, and in modern diction, but Miss Reese should discard of yore from her vocabulary—a convenient rhyme, in five places at least, for door or floor, but worn to shreds long since, and moreover inexactly used in such a present-tense line as
As one who comes back to a house of yore....
[The entire page is 371 words long]
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