LITERATURE

London, England

20 January 1900

(page 60)

RECENT VERSE.

Mr. Aleister Crowley’s APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC (Kegan Paul, (6d) fairly represents his more dedicatory and laudatory manner. His stanzas march resoundingly and there is no lack of energy about them, but politically they mean too much and poetically they mean too little. France, we gather, is to retreat and Russia step aside, and all the world to keep silence, while England and America join hands and proceed wrathfully down the ages amid various phenomenal manifestations of delight on the part of earth and sea and sky. A superfluity of windy imagery gives to the whole poem an air of bravado which is consistent neither with the spirit of the “appeal” nor with the self-contained attitude of Great Britain at the present moment. There is too much about splendid kissing and fervid handclasping and delicious smiling, and we do not like “fangéd pen.”