SOURCE: "In Praise of Mary Coleridge," in Of Books and Men, Julian Messner, Inc. 1942, pp. 166-75.

In the following essay, Reilly provides a brief overview of Coleridge's works and explains prominent themes in her writing.

A contemporary woman critic is on record as lamenting the paucity of women poets in literary history and asserting that those who have achieved fame are inferior to their brother lyrists even in the writing of cradle songs. My concern is not with the fact alleged or with possible explanations of it, but with the danger of overlooking real poetry because its author was a woman who, being dead, can depend on no clique to press her claims. Specifically I am interested in an Englishwoman who died in 1907 at the age of 46 after writing some two hundred poems, mostly lyrics, all brief, amazingly free from inequalities, and at their finest worthy of inclusion...