SOURCE: "William Percy's Collected Poems," in The New York Times Book Review, September 5, 1943, pp. 4, 12.

In the following essay, a review of The Collected Poems, Thorp treats Percy's verse as an artifact of another time.

This volume [The Collected Poems of William Alexander Percy] brings under one cover all the verse which the late William Alexander Percy published in his lifetime: Sappho in Levkas (1915), In April Once (1920), Enzio's Kingdom (1924) and Selected Poems (1930). No poem has been omitted or revised.

Though its imprint is 1943, much of the book is anachronistic. What could a reviewer say of "This Side of Paradise" if it were put into his hands and he were told it had just come from the press? This analogy is not farfetched. Percy considered himself a poet; what he wrote in verse seemed to him more essentially himself than anything he said or did. Yet he deliberately stood aside...