SOURCE: “Lizette Woodworth Reese,” in American Poetry Since 1900, Henry Holt and Company, 1923, pp. 300-02.

In the following excerpt, Untermeyer views Reese's poetry as lucid, surprising, and well-crafted.

Philosophies, fashions, innovations, movements, concern [Lizette Woodworth Reese] not at all; her poetry is bare of social interpretations, problems, almost of ideas. Song, unabashed, actually antiquated song is what she delights in. And out of tunes with little novelty or nuance, she evokes a personal grace that is as fragrant as an old-fashioned flower garden. Miss Reese's realization of this quality finds its fullest expression in the volumes which she has significantly entitled A Branch of May (1887), A Handful of Lavender (1891), A Quiet Road (1896), A Wayside Lute (1909). These volumes, in the chaste reissues printed by Thomas B. Mosher, show Miss Reese as the forerunner of Sara Teasdale, Edna Millay and the new generation to whom simplicity in song is a first...