SOURCE: "Nothing Very New," in Religious Trends In English Poetry, Vol. 5, 1962, pp. 214-21.

In the following essay, Fairchild explains that Noyes's collection. Early Poems, is "an urgent desire for some sort of spiritual affirmation."

… The seventeen pages of Early Poems may surprise readers who associate Noyes with the invitation to come down to Kew, Reminiscent of Swinburne, Banville, Gautier, and Baudelaire, they show that Noyes begins in the nineties as a serious, mildly decadent, but non-Bohemian aesthete who is more interested in the mystical and occult side of French symbolism than most of his English contemporaries. There are hints of Rosicrucianism, as when "The Symbolist" yearns to behold the "unknown land" behind the veil of the temple and "the Cross of flame." In "The Mystic," the motivation of this desire to break through to the ineffable and "drown the finite in the Whole" becomes more Spasmodic than aesthetic...