[Unlike] some of her contemporaries Miss Boyle's emotions do not turn inward, feeding on themselves; and she is not the object of her own speculation. Rather, she offers as a high gift her sympathy and her compassion. The world's injustice grieves her; but the subject of her poetry [in Collected Poems] is the injustice, not her grief. She does not wail because the world's wrong. She laments that men are isolated, that they are needlessly hurt, that her friends—and strangers, too—suffer.

In short, Miss Boyle is a woman poet. The range of her experience is feminine, and her virtues are feminine virtues. (pp. 176-77)

Miss Boyle's reputation rests on her very distinguished fiction; these poems are fugitive pieces. But they are, in their way, as distinguished as her stories. At first glance, they do not seem to be of the same order, for the stories are...