Intelligence and fine attention are perhaps the main merits of these poems. There is to be found in them surely very little especially penetrating consideration or poignant vision of life; such matters seem not to be the object of Mr. Shanks's intention. He is clear-minded; he is consciously cultivated; he is at ease and free. But he does not attempt the fixing of any horizon-stretching ideas or the impingement of any tall ideals. And in the exercise of the poet's particular mightiness, the making of metaphors and visions, cities, creatures, life, he seems graciously rather than greatly engaged. But he thus never exhausts himself and on every occasion chooses his best. His quality is not strained; he is careful and wise as to his limits, and does those things only which he can do evenly and easily. He is studious, as he should be, in the economy of means, in the employment of unostentatious materials, in refinding the endless new textures in old plain-song meanings, in restoring the lost edges of ordinary expression, in revelation of the forgotten face of usual and necessary words. In this and in a certain combination of modesty and ease he might be called a virtuist; for further studies of this sort should probably lead to the classic offhand excellence of the virtuoso. He has lines that surely seem written in the thought of the final fine cleanness of virtuosity.
"The well made sonnet takes the azure sea
Proud in her beauty as a halcyon,
Her timbers chosen words, and melody
Filling her sails of rhyme."
The especial creative virtues of these poems seem to be intelligence and attention rather than emotion and imagination, partly for the reason that in them command of wholes seems not commensurate with finish of parts. The second longest poem in the volume, The Fireless. Town, is crowded with excellent parts, but seems rather of relative consequence totally. The Queen of China is a better poem, surely a better long poem, for the reason that its parts are constrained for the sake of its total effect. As a whole the volume does not request praise so much for imagination or full emotion as for the slight and unintrusive many things done, the discovered multitude of half-secrets that promote the study of comeliness.
