SOURCE: “Lyric Veteran,” in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. VII, No. 15, November 1, 1930, pp. 283-84.

In the following review of White April, Untermeyer argues that the collection as a whole fails to indicate the importance and skill of Reese as a poet, although her stature is more apparent in select individual poems.

It would be an ill thing for Lizette Woodworth Reese as well as for themselves if most of her readers should know her only by her latest book of poems, White April, embodying though it does many of her excellencies. Reading this book as a purely contemporaneous work, one could see at a glance its perfections and its limitations. And yet one would not know this woman as a pioneer—one who, in a lesser but no less consistent way than Emily Dickinson, released woman's poetry from a stilted and sentimental pattern into an arresting and...