A CASUAL VIRTUIST
The Queen of China and Other Poems. By Edward Shanks. 12mo. 240 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. New York.
IF those who believe in being cultivated and casual at the same time could have a special poetry, The Queen of China and Other Poems should find some place in it. The imagery of these is not startling—carefully so—nor exquisite; yet it is prosperous. If there are some hints at lèse-morality, the taste is yet uniformly good. The poems avoid tangential originality; they multiply the things they do not say; their moods are well found, and their terms of expression are developed from good traditions; their verse impressions, to a degree, are those of comeliness and comity. The lines are pleased and pleasant, not casuistical but still not unstudied—always and carefully fluent. Mr. Shanks is considerate with his felicities; he is intelligible as well as sensuous. He is grave and gay—moderately; and especially he is not betrayed readily into lines that were better unwritten.
He does not profess the steep enormous moods; nor is he especially attentive to the subtleties of the spirit. In fact, to anyone accustomed to Browning these poems will seem rather inadequate as a record of the heart's seasons. Yet he has apparently an affluence of the powers that make for competent lines, and he shows on occasion a fine gravity.
He shows most, from verse to verse and page to page profit taken from the study of poetry as it is not usually studied—the study of it not as versification or metaphor, but as modulation. The far, imported idea and the rare, rich image are rare indeed on his page. His care seems to be for flexibility and inflection, those essential and inimitable parts of the expressive mechanism. And surely of all such preoccupations and studies this is the soundest and least liable to asininity; it cannot be pursued mechanically or fanatically; it is subject to a sense of proportion in its student, who cannot master its possibilities except with just intelligence and the finest attention.
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