REVIEW OF SOME POEMS
BY
ALEXANDER SMITH AND MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Poems by Alexander Smith, a volume recently published in London, and by this time reprinted in Boston, deserve attention. They have obtained in England a good deal more notice than is usually accorded there to first volumes of verse; nor is this by any means to be ascribed to the mere fact that the writer is, as we are told, a mechanic; though undoubtedly that does add to their external interest, and perhaps also enhances their intrinsic merit. It is to this, perhaps, that they owe a force of purpose and character which makes them a grateful contrast to the ordinary languid collectanea published by young men of literary habits; and which, on the whole, may be accepted as more than compensation for many imperfections of style and taste.
The models whom this young poet has followed have been, it would appear, predominantly, if not exclusively, the writers of his own immediate time, plus Shakspeare. The antecedents of the 'Life-Drama,' the one long poem which occupies almost the whole of his volume, are to be found in the 'Princess,' in parts of Mrs. Browning, in the love of Keats, and the habit of Shakspeare. There is no Pope, or Dryden,[1] or even Milton;
- ↑ The word spoom, which Dryden uses as the verb of the substantive spume, occurs also in 'Beaumont and Fletcher.' Has Keats employed it? It seems hardly to deserve re-impatriation.
