MR. Loveman comes to us with loud hosannas from the late Sir Edmund Grosse, William Ellery Leonard, Robinson Jeffers, the late Edward Arlington Robinson, and George Sterling, all of whose meeds of praise decorate the dust-wrapper. To be sure, Mr. Sterling offers one sentence which is capable of a double entendre: "There is nothing like this poem in our literature", and that sentence in its rashness is indicative of the critical level of all the other statements made by the others, none of whom was or is a critic of any consequence. As the chief American poet, of course Mr. Jeffers should know better than to bless "The Hermaphrodite", which has a superficial smoothness that some people, like Mr. Benjamin De Casseres, the author of the Preface, will mistake for "passion, seusuousness, and and spontaneity." But still waters do not always run deep--in poetry, and facility is not all. Indeed it is to be doubted whether Mr. Loveman possesses this, if we examine the other poems in the volume.

One verses the very unkind suspicion that Mr. Loveman did well to entitle the verses, "Dream Song" in which the following lines occur:

"Byron's soul was mire,

Goethe's heart was ice;

But mine is a fire

From Paradise."

As for the so-called "Greek quality" of his verses, no sonorous parade of proper names will suffice to persuade one of its existence. If Mr. Loveman ever set out for Mount Paradisc, his mount, Pegasus, either got the staggers on the way or bolted back to Brooklyn.