THE ANTHENAEUM

London, England

6 September 1902

(page 313)

RECENT VERSE.

Mr. Aleister Crowley is an ambitious poet. In Tannhaüser: A Story of All Time (Kegan Paul) he essays no less a theme than the life-history of a soul in the pursuit of the eternal and the real. This is shadowed forth with a good deal of what he chooses to call “Hebrew and Egypto-Christian symbology”—if the term is used at all, it should surely be symbolology—and in the somewhat longwinded and inflated style with which his readers are probably by this time familiar. We do not think Mr. Crowley rises to the height of his great argument, but he avoids some of the worst eccentricities of the last volume of his verse which came before us.