SOURCE: "The Man and the Poet," in Samuel Rogers and His Circle, E. P. Dutton and Company, 1910, pp. 65-94.

In the following excerpt, Roberts reviews Rogers's major poems.

. . . Rogers' own poetry, while it is careful, regular, smooth, finished, full of the most unexceptionable sentiment, is almost entirely devoid of life and of personal truth. And it is in this last that we mark the distinction between accomplished verse and real poetry. Just as religion is not the repetition of creed or formula, not the acceptance of orthodoxy, not the following of a theological fashion, but an emotional truth personally discerned and followed: so true poetry is not the composition of pleasant verses, fortified by a correct taste and a due disposition of epithets and sentiments. It is emotional reality, personally discerned and personally expressed. Now until we come to Italy we scarcely ever get in Rogers' verse the...