[In the following review of The Selected Poems of Lizette Woodworth Reese, Taggard states that the poems possess “deep feeling” and compares Reese's writing to that of Edna Millay and Emily Dickinson.]

Miss reese has a slow and fragile gift, by means of which she has accomplished very high things. She has refused to be many things her gift might imply, and she has written the sonnet “Tears,” with its Miltonic beginning, which consoles us in the end for its lack of Miltonic grandeur and stern-ness by being the purest and tenderest of poems.

When I consider Life and its few years—
A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun;
A call to battle, and the battle done
Ere the last echo dies within our ears;
A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears;
The gusts that past a darkening shore do beat;
A burst of music down an unlistening street—
I wonder at the idleness of tears.
Ye old, old dead and ye of yesternight,
Chieftains and bards and keepers of sheep,
By every cup of sorrow that you had,
Loose me from tears, and make me see aright
How each hath back what once he stayed to weep;
Homer his sight, David his little lad.

This is Miss Reese's seventh book, and the poems that conclude it are less in the May, Lavender and Wild-Cherry mood than her earlier ones. The dead friend and the dead lover, wayside lanes, rain, holy days and praise of common things permeate everything she writes. Spiritual things are always unique and real to her soul's eyes. Perhaps that is why she seems to care so little for fresh and rugged sight of the world around her. She lives in a dream country, the world of Housman, and all gentle English-fond poets. Her slowness and quietness and lack of cleverness make her seem like a little petal from the tree of Miss Millay, which has burst into a large heaven-set cloud.

Indeed, a careful reading of Miss Reese shows a kinship to both Edna Millay and Emily Dickinson. Her total quality is remote from them, but certain units and symbols in both are observed and touched with the same feminine mind.

But just now out in the lane
Oh the scent of mint was plain!

has been cast in better form in “My Heart, Being Hungry”:

Nor linger in the rain to mark
The smell of tansy through the dark.

My guess is that Miss Reese influenced the early Miss Millay; and curiously enough the later Miss Reese writes clearly aware of her contemporary in such lines as:

My dear, my dear, forgive me for the wrong.

and

I dig amongst the roots of life.

I cannot prove at all my feeling that Miss Reese is close in kin to Emily Dickinson. But among the large number of her readers I think there will be some who will catch the likeness at odd moments. Emily Dickinson constructed poems like atoms, which when caught under a microscope prove to be as much universe as atom. Miss Reese is not so angular, so bold, so tremendous or so exquisite. But she speaks the same language, although the defeat and victory that exist side by side in Emily Dickinson are never in her. The undeniable metaphysical talent in her is softened by white beauty.

Her best poems are least resigned. Like “The Dust” and “Immortality”and “Waiting” and “Love Came Back at Fall of Dew,” this called “Tragic Books” from her new poems, has a brief, plain beauty:

That I have lived I know; that I
Have loved is quite as plain;
Why read of Lear, a wild old king,
Of Cæsar stabbed in vain?
The bitter fool, the Dover heath,
The stumbling in the grass
I know. I know the windy crowd,
And Rome as in a glass.
Life taught them all. These later days
Are full enough of rain;
I will not weep unless I must,
Or break my heart again.

“Telling the Bees” and “Lydia Is Gone This Many a Year” are poems with a sad delicacy, too fragile and unhurried to be sentimental. Miss Reese's lyric gift lies not in what she says, nor the manner of her saying it, neither of which is unusual, but in a very deep and quiet permanency of feeling, as difficult to describe as the opening of a million small buds on a tree. In “To a Town Poet” she instructs a younger generation:

Let trick of words be past;
Strict with the thought, unfearful of the form,
So shall you find the way and hold it fast,
The world hear, at last,
The horns of morning sound above the storm.