All is silent under the steep cone of afternoon:
The sky is imperturbably profound.
The ultimate divine union seems about to be accomplished,
All is troubled at the attainment
Of the inexhaustible infinite.
The rolling and the tossing of the sides of immense pavilions
Under the whirling wind that screams up the cloudless sky.
The name of John Curtis Underwood has for a long time been associated with the literature of insurgency and this volume is no exception. It is first of all a passionately idealistic commentary on life and only secondarily a book of verse. The spirit of the whole is the cosmic spirit which John Alford amusingly deplores in American poetry, with its real strength of evolutionary optimism, and its consequent loss of clarity and definite conceptions.
Mr. Underwood is too vague, too lacking in lyric poignancy, too careless of his choice of words, to be distinguished as a poet. He writes in complicated rhyme and rhythm schemes, and is very fond of the rapid beats, those which in Sidney Lanier’s method of notation would be three-four time and four-four time, with only one strong beat to the measure. But in English these forms, like their counterparts the waltz and the march, have a tendency to carry the mind forward so swiftly with the beat of the rhythm that the sense is lost. Mr. Underwood has not escaped the danger. And in this volume, which is two hundred and seventy pages, he
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