SOURCE: “Round about Parnassus,” in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. VIII, No. 34, March 12, 1932, p. 588.

In the following excerpt, Benet gives a positive review of The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, concluding that Chesterton's poetry in particular “communicates noble emotion.”

The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (Dodd, Mead) is, to me, an event. Despite his infinite polemics, his numerous novels, his multitudinous essays, his detective stories, and his master paradoxes, Gilbert Chesterton's greatest gift from the gods was the gift of verse. If he learned his art from masters so diverse as Lord Macaulay, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Charles Stuart Calverley, nevertheless he learned his lessons well. And from his lessons he rose to travel his own road. It turned out to be the road of the troubadour. If his paradoxes stole into his lyrics like the little dwarfs he describes that stole in and out...