Mrs. Daryush has engaged in certain technical practices which perhaps need to be explained…. The principles of syllabic meter are simple in theory: the line is measured by syllable-count and must not be measurable by any other pattern. The poet is thus required to vary the number and pattern of stresses from line to line, and to do it in such a manner as to create a successful rhythm; he is at the same time free to rhyme unaccented with accented syllables, as heiress with bless. The poet is thus given more freedom, or at least more variety, potentially, than is easily managed, and unless both line and poem are short, the rhythm is likely to degenerate into shapelessness. Within proper limits, however, this meter can be used with extraordinary success, as Mrs. Daryush has demonstrated. (pp. ix-x)

Mrs. Daryush allows herself no elision; every syllable which is spoken is counted. And although she has used the twelve-syllable line with about as much success as it admits …, she confines her syllabic poems mainly to the five-syllable line, either alone or in combination with the line of four syllables, with results which are often remarkably beautiful…. (pp. x-xi)

As to the subject matter of [Selected Poems], the reader may at first examination feel that there is more similarity and less richness than is actually present. A good many of the poems are in some measure descriptive, although the descriptive element becomes less marked in the later poems. Within the poems which one might label as more or less descriptive, however, there is a good deal of diversity…. Underlying many of these poems is an acute sense, often hard to lay a finger on precisely, not only of the impermanence of life, but of its almost ironic precariousness in spite of its beauty, and similarly of the precariousness of personal integrity, and this sense increases in the later poems, which are less preoccupied with Nature and more with society, especially with the precariousness of the society of our century; a sense which becomes almost brutally harsh in XLVI, and which reaches its finest expression, I suspect, in the two-edged loveliness of Still-Life. On the other hand, Mrs. Daryush has shown a remarkable gift for dealing directly with experience, with little or no intervention by sensory material; some of her most beautiful poems are nearly free from description and imagery and display something of the plain purity of medieval and Renaissance poetry at its best…. (pp. xi-xiii)

I should like to call attention briefly to the outstanding qualities of the poet's diction: its quietness and its concentration…. [There] is no ambiguity and there is little potentiality: what she does is actual, it is realized. Unlike so many of the poets of our time, she never seems to say more than she means; she seems to say less, and one has to read her repeatedly to find it all, but when one really looks it is all there and in small space. She is not pretentious, she is not an exhibitionist; she is rather perfectly serious and perfectly honest—she has something on her mind, she knows it is worth saying, and she tries to say what she means, by employing all the subtlest resources of her art. Poetry as an art is an anomaly at present, an anachronism; poetry today is rather a debauch, a form of self-indulgence, or a form of self-advertisement. But it was once an art, and it will be again, and I believe that Mrs. Daryush will survive the interval. (p. xiii)