my Xu Zhimo

Meredith and Mr Hardy, coming at the end of the Romantic movement and contemporaries of that extreme poet Swinburne, have been prose writers who have tried to impart some of the virtues of prose to poetry.

But there is a section of this book, the fifteen 'Satires of Circumstance' which give it its title, in which we feel that Mr Hardy would have done better in prose. It is not that they are prosaic, but that he does not manage to tell enough in verse. In each he gives us merely a situation, an ugly sitation, with all the emphasis of verse laid on the whole ugliness, as if he had a brief against life; and in each case we feel that the whole truth is not told and could not be told in this medium.

Unsigned review in the Times Literary Supplement, (19 November 1914).