The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

CRITICS and poets here and abroad are paying superlative tribute to England’s new epic poem, The Testament of Beauty, by Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate. It is no secret that Mr. Bridges has in the past been unduly neglected. In part this may be attributed to the relatively few books that have come from his pen; for the rest we have only our lack of discernment to blame. Now, in his eighty-sixth year, he has published ‘a poem, longer than Paradise Regained and fuller of thought and feeling than any long poem since Wordsworth’s Prelude’; and at last tribute is paid where tribute is due.

In The Testament of Beauty Mr. Bridges is responsible for occasional simplified spellings, rather surprising, however well they may convey the sound; but these optical irritations are a small price to pay for the beauty of a poem which, it seems to me, is made more explicable after this lucid appraisal of Mr. John Finley, Jr.

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