The times are choked and cluttered with disillusion—a sticky disillusion, an adolescent petulance, solemn and unreasonable, that pours itself out in dull, formless novels dealing with ugly people who should have been stepped upon at birth, if indeed they were really as mudgy and disagreeable as the writers make them out—which is most improbable. We are blared at and saxophoned by a tinny sophistication that means nothing, and is nothing but the restlessness of smart people who think they are not appreciated, or the shallow bawdry of children educated beyond their characters. Cynicism leaves the sincerity of a tub for the suspicious publicity of a night club, and a “hard” generation patronizes in the comic strips cruel jokes and a sentimental Tarzan using bad medieval English, without a breath's pause between.

We look for a bitterness that can still be gay, and a witty sorrow, and a disillusion that can thumb its nose at the old one who makes lives “gang agley,” and find little salt of that savor in contemporary prose, but some, thank heaven! still in poetry. In verse of a Horatian lightness, with an exquisite certainty of technique, which, like the lustre on a Persian bowl, is proof that civilization is itself a philosophy, Dorothy Parker is writing poetry deserving high praise. If I compare her to Horace and Martial I do so largely, since I am no Latinist, and can better describe the perfection of her admirable lyrics by a comparison with that almost forgotten humorist, Thomas Hood, who had a gift of beauty second only to his contemporary, Keats, and yet could twist a stanza into laughter with one deft, inimitable line. Hood was a romantic, and when in his vein of sentiment was too much the slave of his mood to lift out into wit. He wrote one of Dorothy Parker's finest poems (“Requiescat”) in an epigram—the same figure, the same twist, but all made into farce. And in his serious poems, the last line, in which Mrs. Parker stabs sorrow with a jest, is to be found not in the verse but in the pathetic commentaries of his letters. Dorothy Parker has, it seems to me, perfected his art—

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

This is slight; her powers are better expressed in “The Evening Primrose”

You know the bloom, unearthly white,
That none has seen by morning light—
The tender moon alone, may bare
Its beauty to the secret air.
Who'd venture past its dark retreat
Must kneel, for holy things and sweet.
That blossom, mystically blown,
No man may gather for his own
Nor touch it, lest it droop and fall. …
Oh, I am not like that at all!

A lesser humorist would have overstressed the virginal beauty, a lesser poet would have failed to make the last line poignant as well as pungent.

We are easily thrown off by lightness and good humor, for pain and a burning heart may be taken, that way, in homeopathic doses. The river of criticism rolls muddy and splashing about difficult metaphysical poetry which grunts and wheezes unintelligibilities, like a Chinese poet speaking through the mouth of a hippopotamus, while we forget the perfect poems, so lucid as to seem simple, so simple in theme as to seem obvious, yet with three quarters of what matters packed in their lines—

Ah, what avails the sceptered race!
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee.

Or, to go back to Hood—

I saw thee, lovely Ines,
Descend alone the shore,
With bands of noble gentlemen,
And banners waved before;
And gentle youth and maidens gay,
And snowy plumes they wore:
It would have been a beauteous dream—
If it had been no more!

Yet I suspect that one should quote Latin rather than English to parallel the edged fineness of Dorothy Parker's verse. This belle dame sans merci has the ruthlessness of the great tragic lyricists whose work was allegorized in the fable of the nightingale singing with her breast against a thorn. It is disillusion recollected in tranquillity where the imagination has at last controlled the emotions. It comes out clear, and with the authentic sparkle of a great vintage. I attempt no real criticism here, but I do assert that these poems [in Death and Taxes] deserve criticism and appraisal far more than many much bewritten books of more pretentious cerebration, yet with less beauty of technique and far less depth of emotion. She writes of violets—

You are brief and frail and blue—
Little sisters, I am, too.
You are heaven's masterpieces—
Little loves, the likeness ceases.

But there is no frailty in her poetry, and its brevity is in space not in time.