SOURCE: “Poems,” in The Athenaeum, No. 4569, May 22, 1915, pp. 460-61.

In the following review of Chesterton's Poems, the reviewer concludes that the volume contains both the “best and … worst” of Chesterton's works, and that Chesterton is a better poet than he is a prose writer.

Robustness, sometimes giving way to an affectation of the robust, has always been the leading characteristic of Mr. Chesterton's work, both in prose and verse. This preference for size and strength has led him to select exceptionally large men—Sunday, Flambeau, Innocent Smith—to be the heroes of his romances, to employ words and phrases on account of their general largeness, to use superlatives and all the tricks of emphasis, often at a heavy cost. If Mr. Chesterton's poetry at its best suggests music, as good poetry must, it degenerates at times into the sort of music we associate with a crude open-air band...