[In Elizabeth Daryush's Collected Poems her experiments in syllabic measures,] though fascinating, can unbalance a response which should be given to the total tone and effect of this enigmatic and rewarding writer.

Elizabeth Daryush compels the reader to accept a world conditioned by several qualities rarely found in contemporary poetry. The world is self-sufficient, persuading the reader of its validity by the stern insistence of a diction as apparently outmoded as that of de la Mare, a taut sense of cadence as timeless as that of Jonson or Herrick, a firm moral sense…. In the world Elizabeth Daryush creates, though the eye at first refuses the run of epithets, seemingly so locked into an obsolete tradition—beauteous, faery, dew-alchemy—the poems make the impossible probable. Not only is there a surface play and dazzle drawn from a full-blown romantic tradition, there is a further cluster of words from...