THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

12 August 1899

(PAGE 4)

CURRENT LITERATURE.

MR. ALEISTER CROWLEY'S POEMS.

Mr. Aleister Crowley is a very vigorous and very prolific disciple of the Swinburnian school of poetry. Not the early school with its musical voluptuousness, or the latest school with its respectableness, but a sort of middle school which includes the music and mastery of versification. Mr. Crowley has now published “Jephthah and Other Mysteries, Lyrical and Dramatic” (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co.), which is dedicated to Swinburne, and which is really—it is very handsomely presented to the public—a tribute that any poet might welcome with complaisance. The tragedy, which gives its name to the book, is replete with sonorous verses and fine imagery. The poet feels the pathos of the father’s suffering and the maiden’s grief, and he represents it in verse, whose form in unchallengeable. The high level touched at times is not always maintained or even nearly reached, but some of the songs of the chorus are classical in their mournful melody. Mr. Crowley will be heard of more favourably yet, if he will but rein in that prancing Pegasus of his.