SOURCE: “More Mavericks,” in Religious Trends in English Poetry, Vol. V: 1880-1920, Gods of a Changing Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1962, pp. 306-311.

In the following excerpt, Fairchild discusses major themes and ideas in Bottomley's poetry.

Born in 1874, Gordon Bottomley published two immature and derivative volumes of verse in the nineties, the first depending mainly on Rossetti and the second mainly on Yeats. In The Gate of Smaragdus (1904) he began to walk alone, and in Chambers of Imagery (1907) he emerged as his uneven, restlessly searching true self. But by 1912, when a second series of Chambers appeared, he had already begun to devote himself chiefly though not exclusively to verse dramas which treated legendary tragic themes with a harshly primitive realism which some people found rather shocking. Such readers preferred the impressionistic incantatory lyrics in which he emulated and sometimes rivaled De la Mare, or the more numerous nature poems...