SOURCE: "Richard Middleton," in his Papers on Shelley, Wordsworth & Others, 1929. Reprint by Books for Libraries Press, 1967, pp. 128-35.

In the following essay, Chapman offers a negative assessment of Middleton's poetry.

Dear God, what means a poet more or less?

Richard Middleton wrote that. He was of our time; had he not died as a young man (he was only twenty-nine), he would still be alive. He belongs to that group of latter-day English poets—Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson, and Stephen Phillips—who, if they have not this or that in common, have all of them this, that they, dying young, added their names to those others who died young; the roll, the chief names in which are Chatterton and Keats. A roll to which one may add Shelley's name, though his was a violent death, and the names of those whom the Great War took away...