Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell once wrote a very long poem, two lines of which stay in my memory:

     My natural clumsiness was my only bar to progress
     Until I conquered it by calculation.

As I go through such of Miss Loy's poems as I possess, this seems to describe her. If she has not actually conquered the clumsiness which one can scarcely help feeling in her writings, she has, from time to time, overcome it; and these occasional advantages have resulted in momentous poems. Or perhaps it is not clumsiness, but the inherently unyielding quality of her material that causes this embarrassment. She moves like one walking through granite instead of air, and when she achieves a moment of beauty it strikes one cold.

More intent on the gutter and its horrors than any of the group with which she was allied, and more intensely cerebral, perhaps, than any...