SOURCE: A review of Drake: An English Epic, in The Times Literary Supplement, July 6, 1906, pp. 241.

This review of Noyes 's Drake: An English Epic criticizes the work for its mediocre writing and lack of depth.

Courage is a great quality everywhere; but perhaps it is seldom greater than in the young poet who sets out to write an epic. Most brave things are done in the stir of the blood, in the eye of a man's comrades, in the passing of a moment. Here is a thing that has to be done alone through months or years that must bring many hours of discouragement. The intellectual fire that is to accomplish it is not of that comparatively easy order which flames high for a moment and then dies down in smoke; it is of that rarer and finer sort which glows continuously red hot from the beginning to...