THE ANTHENAEUM

London, England

31 August 1901

(page 282)

RECENT VERSE.

Mr. Aleister Crowley is a kind of middle-class Swinburne at second hand, without the scholarship, without the splendid phrase, without the ardour of beauty. He has a certain rhythmical fluency, and in that statement all his literary merits are summed up. If the reader can form a conception of a wind-bag foaming at the mouth, he will get some notion of The Mother's Tragedy, and other Poems (privately printed). Even this mixed metaphor will not convey to him the morbid unpleasantness of Mr. Crowley’s taste in subjects. 'The Mother’s Tragedy' is a drama of incest, crudely and violently treated. Some of the shorter poems are worse.