Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/402

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse leave, if one have laid them by for long enough to have an impression of the book as a whole, and not a confusion, not the many little contradictory impressions of individual poems His friends, with the sole exception of Mr. Yeats, seem to regard him as a prose writer who inadvertently strayed into verse. His language is formal. It has an old-fashioned kind of precision that is very difficult from the sort of precision now sought, yet, in the dozen places where this stately and meticulous speech is moved by unwonted passion, Lionel Johnson has left poems as beautiful as any in English; as in the poem:

Or in the poem to O'Leary:

Or in the poem to Oliver Georges Destrée:

Johnson's verse is full of inversion., Having held out for a uniform standard of appreciation, having insisted that one