SOURCE: “The Ballad of the White Horse,” in Yale Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, January, 1912, pp. 334-35.

In the following review, Dodd contends that while The Ballad of the White Horse has an engaging story line, its quality as a poem is “rough” and at times “infelicitous.”

A critic may well tremble who is given a book of verse to review briefly, and who opens the book to find it contains but one mighty “Ballad” in eight “Books”—a poem, however named, of almost epical sweep and proportions, dealing in a free, broadly imaginative way with certain legendary or traditional material in connection with King Alfred. There can be no doubt that Mr. Chesterton, hitherto famed as a brilliant if often perverse writer of prose, has in this Ballad of the White Horse made a serious attempt to write not merely poetry, but a nobly planned poem. He tells his...