English Poetry: An Unfinished History

When a Poet writes poetry he can scarcely fail to interest. And the author of this posthumous volume was not only a poet but no mean critic too. As a result, his approach to English Poetry is not a work of merely casual interest: it is illuminating. No one could fail to be enriched and delighted by its discriminating enthusiasms, its happy quotations, and the no less happy judgements, discoveries, definitions and phrases which it gives us.

The historical portion is contained in the latter half, which deals with its subject in a discursive way from the beginnings to Elizabethan times - where the author stopped in the middle of a sentence. This premature ending is deepy regretted. But, fortunately for us, the first five chapters are devoted to general and personal observations, and are so full of references to the intervening and modern periods that we can genuinely claim to have here a fair impression of Drinkwater’s view of the whole panorama of English Poetry.