In singling out the most telling feature of poems by Rosamund Marriott Watson, William Archer settled on their intimidating "correctness": "Without metaphor or exaggeration of any sort, Mrs. Marriott-Watson has achieved an astonishing correctness of style and perfection of technique. 'Achieved' is perhaps not the right word; this sense of form is a thing innate, constitutional." Archer referred chiefly to her lyrics; the American editor Edmund Clarence Stedman, who included her work in his Victorian Anthology (1895), linked quite different traits to her ballads. In an 1895 letter to Robert Bridges he wrote, "The Armytage-Tomson-Watson sequence is interesting. Well, a woman who can write such ballads has a right to be her own mistress--to touch Life, one may say, at as many points as she cares for""

Technical control fused with imaginative and erotic flight (Stedman's "sequence" refers to the poet's second adulterous elopement from marriage) informs the career of...