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Contemporary poets may be divided into two classes. There are those who were dumb before the war; they wanted ‘the accomplishment of verse’; but they have been rendered vocal through the stress of emotion caused by the great conflict. There are others to whom the ‘accomplishment of verse’ was native when the war began, but whose gift of lyrical expression has been enhanced by the experiences of the last thirty months.

“E. A. Mackintosh belongs to the later category, for nearly half the poems in his ‘A Highland Regiment’ were written in days of peace. Hence this is an unusually interesting volume; it enables the student of poetry to examine in the work of one man what the influence of war has been on the poetic spirit. Briefly, it may be said that a comparison between the peace and war verse of Mr Mackintosh shows that the latter is superior to the former, and that the native Celtic temperament of the writer has been greatly intensified by his experience of the clash of arms. It has been a very real experience of war, inasmuch as Mr Mackintosh is a lieutenant in the Seaforth Highlanders, and has won the Military Cross.”—Daily Graphic.

“Lieutenant E. A. Mackintosh will rank high in the brotherhood of soldier poets who have found themselves since the war began. The ‘Other Poems’ in this volume prove that he was a poet in the making even in the days of peace, that now seem so far away behind the blue hills of Time—but, then, there was no matter to match his manner, no passion in retrospect to be the background of his mood, but only the conventional back cloth of boyish melancholy against which so many Oxonians pose poetically (at Cambridge they have thrown the doleful rag away!). But his poems from the war, and even those written on the way to it, reveal him as a true poet, both born and made, with a style purged of all its former cleverness and insincerity.”—Morning Post.