ABSTRACT
Mr. Wilde’s verses belong to a class which is the special terror of reviewers, the poetry which is neither good nor bad, which calls for neither praise nor ridicule, and in which we search in vain for any personal touch of thought or music. The author possesses cleverness, astonishing fluency, a rich and full vocabulary, and nothing to say. Mr. Wilde has read Messrs. Tennyson, Swinburne, Arnold, and Rossetti with great pleasure, and he has paid them the compliment of copying their mannerisms very naïvely; indeed, it might be fairly said that his book is little more than a cento of reminiscences from these poets. The great fault of all such writing as this is the want of literary sincerity that it displays. For instance, Mr. Wilde, brings in to his verse the names of innumerable birds and flowers, because he likes the sound of their names, not because he has made any observation of their habits. He thinks that the meadow-sweet and the woodanemone bloom at the same time, that that shy and isolated flower the harebell ‘breaks across the woodland’ in masses ‘like a sudden flush of sea,’ and that owls are commonly met with in mid-ocean. But worse than this profuse and careless imagery is the sensual and ignoble tone which deforms a large proportion of the poems, and for which the plea of youth is scarcely sufficient excuse. So much talk about ‘grand cool flanks’ and ‘crescent thighs’ is decidedly offensive, and we have no wish to know that the writer ever ‘paddled with the polished throat’ of his lady-love. The book is not without traces of cleverness, but is marred everywhere by imitation, insincerity, and bad taste.
