[Gibbs was an American poet. In this excerpt, she attempts to define the poetry of A Cage of Spines. Gibbs concludes her observations with a wish that Swenson would attempt more ambitious poetry.]

[How], on the basis of the poems in A Cage of Spines, would I, as a particular critic—not speaking at all for Miss Swenson, but putting myself as nearly as possible in the poems' posture—describe the view of poetry herein represented? Several questions that I might ask myself occur to me: (1) Does the poem have a subject, other than itself? (2) If it has such a recognizable subject, then in what relation to same does the poem stand (setting to jewel, pattern to thread, identity, jeu d'esprit to occasion, or some other that I cannot now think of)? (3) Or, another way of inquiring about what may well be the same thing, how seriously does the poem take, or commit itself to, its subject? Then (4) What is its language like, not in its personal and particular flavor, but as regards formality or lack thereof, crispness or sloppiness, tightness or looseness—these being the lines of division today? These four will do to start, and I may as well begin by saying that the answer to number one (does the poem have a subject other than itself?) will be yes in all cases here under consideration, so that question number one may be eliminated from further discussion. As for number two (if it has such a recognizable subject, then in what relation to same does the poem stand?), for A Cage of Spines I would answer that the figure of "pattern to thread" comes closest, since the subjects are most often clusters of observation about a single conceit, like fire/lion, or hand/starfish, and the poem is finished when all the small conceits adhering to the central one have been stated. Thus there is no decoration of the subject, but neither is there complete identity between poem and subject, as it is quite easy to imagine there having been one less small conceit in the cluster. This, I believe, points the answer to number three (how seriously does the poem take, or commit itself to, its subject?): neither frivolously, nor yet with utter seriousness of commitment, but rather as though one were to play an exquisite game for the sake of the game, and either because of some code of manners, or through fear of the passion's becoming self-destructive, keep oneself partly aloof. In other words, poetry is either an exercise in which manners are important, or else it is a dangerous exercise, And question number four (what is its language like?): this is, of course, the hardest to answer, since language must be used to describe language, but I'll do my best. It is not a rhetorically heightened language—rather on the plain side, likewise as to vocabulary. It is fairly tightly worked as to sound, with rhyme and assonance occurring subtly, irregularly, and often. It is a language without waste—or to avoid the pejorative word—without slack, taken up to the full by its subject. Now, I will make one, perhaps unjustifiable, assumption, namely that a connection exists between a poet's critical position and/or taste, and the poems he writes, and acting on this assumption—with the proviso that it may be wrong—I will hazard these remarks about what Miss Swenson might consider a good poem: it will have a subject, it will not have a merely decorative relation to that subject, it will take its subject seriously, perhaps with a limitation of good manners, and its language will be plain, well-wrought, close-fitting, and addressed to the ear in some fashion. …

I would say of A Cage of Spines that, just as it chooses its own tradition by the laws of self and idiosyncrasy, it submits to a self-imposed limitation, that of the surface, or mere existence, of things. This can be a prison, and I think in some of her poems one has a sense of too little ventured, while in the book as a whole the riddles and the miraculously apt descriptions tend to cancel one another, in effect. You begin to see, by the end of the book, that if Miss Swenson can do it once—and she certainly can—then there's nothing to prevent her doing it over and over ad infinitum. A somewhat depressing thought. Even granting, as I do, that since she is a gifted poet in this way, each time she does it, it is a new creation, full of marvelous and sparking revelations. I should probably not have brought up this point at all, were it not for the fact that in a few poems it is gainsaid and something entirely different happens and one is suddenly face to face with an emotion rather than a jubilant play of sense. Poems in which this happens are, for me, "Frontispiece," "The Tide at Long Point," "The Even Sea," and some others. I wish there were more like these (not fewer of the others). Why should someone of Miss Swenson's gifts settle for less than the whole business of poetry? Let her be less cautions, I say, less nice. A more hazardous game and chance of greater winnings, as well as greater losses.