my Xu Zhimo

Mr Hardy's new volume of poems is a very interesting, and in some ways a baffling book...

It is full of poetry; and yet it is also full of ugly and cumbrous expressions, clumsy metres, and flat, prosaic turns of speech.

a curious mixture of the contorted and the jog-trot

Even Mr Hardy's grammar is not impeccable.

And his vocabulary, though in general it is rich and apt, has occasional significant lapses...

It is important to observe such characteristics, because, in Mr Hardy's case, they are not merely superficial and occasional blemishes; they are in reality an essential ingredient in the very essence of his work. The originality of his poetry lies in the fact that it bears everywhere upon it the impress of a master of prose fiction.

...Mr Hardy... has brought the realism and sobriety of prose into the service of his poetry. The result is a product of a kind very difficult to parallel in our literature.

...but what gives Mr Hardy's poems their unique flavour is precisely their utter lack of romanticism, their common, undecorated presentments of things. The are, in fact, modern as no other poems are.

Many of the poems - and in particular the remarkable group of 'fifteen glimpses' which gives its title to the volume - consist of compressed dramatic narratives, of central episodes of passion and circumstance, depicted with extraordinary vividness. A flashlight is turned for a moment upon some scene or upon some character, and in that moment the tragedies of whole lives and the long fatalities of human relationships seem to stand revealed...

Review in New Statesman (19 December 1914).