If you ask me to say precisely what that “means” I could only explain it in this way. When I read that poem I experience the emotions I should expect to receive if I were lying in a sunny meadow on some hot late September afternoon—somewhere far inland, where there would be a great silence broken very gently by the rustle of the heavy headed grass and by the stir of falling beech leaves—somewhere so far inland, somewhere so hot, that it would come as a shock of delighted surprise to think of a “cool god in a chamber under Lycia’s far coast.” It does not annoy me that I have never been to Lycia, that I have no more idea who Sitalkas and Argestes were than who Sir Patric Spens was; it is all one; I get my impression just the same, which, I take it, is what the author aimed at. And indeed the odd unknown names give it a very agreeable sense of mystery and of aloofness. Such are some of the qualities of the work of the young American who hides her identity under the initials H. D. I believe her work is quite unknown in America, though, before the war, I remember seeing some comment on it in a French literary paper. It was in another French review that a critic complained that this author was not interested in aeroplanes and factory chimneys. Somehow I feel quite coldly about factory chimneys when I read sudden intense outbursts of poetry like those I have quoted and like this: The light of her face falls from its flower As a hyacinth, Hidden in a far valley, Perishes upon burnt grass. Editorials and Announcements _On Criticism_ There is something particularly delightful to me in reviewing John Cowper Powys’s book, _Visions and Revisions_, in THE LITTLE REVIEW. For Mr. Powys, though quite unconscious of it, was one of the main inspirations behind the coming-to-be of this magazine. Two years ago we heard him lecture on Pater and Arnold and came from that rite determined, if possible, to reflect something of his attitude, his critical appreciation, in a magazine. I remember the thrill of it very vividly: “_That is criticism!_” we said. And so I am going to let Mr. Powys speak for us by quoting almost the entire preface from his new volume with its critical essays on Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, El Greco, Milton, Lamb, Arnold, Shelley, Keats, Nietzsche, Hardy, Dostoevsky, Poe, and others. I am sure that, as THE LITTLE REVIEW’S godfather, he will not mind being quoted so at length: “Most books of critical essays take upon themselves with unpardonable effrontery, to weigh and judge from their own petty suburban pedestal, the great Shadows they review. It is an insolence! How should Professor This, or Doctor That, whose furthest adventures of ‘dangerous living’ have been squalid philanderings with their neighbors’ wives, bring an Ethical Synthesis to bear that shall put Shakespeare and Hardy, Milton and Rabelais, into appropriate niches?