THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN

London, England

15 August 1899

(PAGE 7)

BOOKS OF THE WEEK.

If Mr. Swinburne had never written we should all be hailing Mr. Aleister Crowley a very great poet indeed. His new volume Jephthah and Other Mysteries (Kegan Paul and Co., 8vo, pp. xxi, 223, 7s. 6d.) contains much delightful verse which yet can hardly be praised as it would be if "Poems and Ballads" and its successors had never been printed. Take for instance—

A time for song and laughter,

And tender tears that fall;

A time to think of after,

One long sweet festival;

A time for love and gladness,

For life and hope and madness,

And scarce a tinge of sadness

To sanctify it all.

Or take this stanza from one of the fine choruses in "Jephthah":—

For the web of the battle is woven

Of men that are strong as the sea,

When the rocks by its tempest are cloven

And waves wander wild to the lee;

When ships are in travail forsaken,

And tempest and tumult awaken;

When foam by fresh foam overtaken

Boils sanguine and fervent and free,

It is extremely difficult to know how far this sort of thing is purely imitative and how far it is the product of a really poetical mind over-strained by the attraction of Mr. Swinburne's genius. The book is dedicated to Mr. Swinburne in glowing and admiring lines that incline us to solve the puzzle in the latter fashion. "Jephthah" itself is a largely conceived and finely executed piece of work which alone is enough to prove Mr. Crowley's independent claim to the name of poet. It will be easier to judge his orbit when he gets a little further away from the giant planet that has drawn him.

At present we can only say that his work shows skill and promise enough to make us hope that he will not sink into a mere satellite.