Sylvia Townsend Warner Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Gavin Ewart

Critical Essay by Gavin Ewart

[Twelve Poems] is more in the nature of a pendant to [Sylvia Townsend Warner's] work and a memorial to her talent than of very great importance in a literary sense. The twelve short poems show an honest and admirable character, bearing the heavy weight of history and rural tradition, old age and the approach of death. Assonance and rhyme are used…. Some poems are epigrammatic, some are like Hardy ('Dorset Endearments'). The best is 'Graveyard in Norfolk', which is entirely in her own voice, using a complicated rhyming stanza. But 'Earl Cassillis's Lady' and 'December 31st St. Silvester' are also well written and satisfying.

Gavin Ewart, "English Poetry: 'Twelve Poems'," in British Book News (© The British Council, 1980), June, 1980, p. 371.