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 this connection, readers should at least applaud his willingness to gamble for an idiom which is original, rich and strange, even at the risk of falling over into the absurd and his refusal to play it safe by harboring up in a safe pedestrianism to which even the most preciously acidulous critics cannot take particular exception. It is unfortunate, however, that he seems as yet unable to perform a simple labor of excision on lines and whole stanzas and so raise to a fairly impressive standard the poems they now ruin.

His images, in the first place, are sensuous to such an extent that in the lyrical celebration of passion they sometimes give the effect of an obsession with the physical. There is little intellectual tension and not much attempt to achieve an unwavering clarity through the use of the exact word or phrase. He proceeds, rather, through a violent juxtaposition of unlike elements and associations to achieve effects which, when successful, are striking, unexpected and memorable. In the over-all sense, his lines may be compared to those isotopes which emerge from the Oak Ridge Pile, where common elements whose atomic nuclei have been subjected to neutron bombardment become radioactive and unstable. Different isotopes, in addition to emitting different kinds of radiation, have, as must be common knowledge now, different rates of radioactive decay, or "half-life." Where Mr. Lee's verse is at its best, his elements are not only radioactive, they are endowed with a considerable half-life. Far too often, however, the image is so forced that it will not hold together at all; it simply explodes, or, like the isotope of Boron, has a half-life of 1/200 of a second.

Examples of this almost instantaneous disintegration may be picked at random: "Your lips are turreted with guns, / and bullets crack across your kiss…." "Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye …" "… slow from the wild crab's bearded breast / the palsied apples fall." "I want your lips of wet roses / laid over my eyes." Perhaps for this last the figure will have to be altered, since, while there are isotopes which are particularly deadly, it would be difficult to say of any that it is just repulsive.

In those lines where Mr. Lee is at his best there is an effect of lyrical effortlessness and inevitability which leaves considerably in the background a lot of contemporary verse that has been, and will be, better acclaimed. If he knew where to cut or when to stop, he might be one of the more important poets writing today. As this is early work, his first book, he may be yet; he has an open field.