SOURCE: “Two Poetesses,” in Authors Dead & Living, Chatto & Windus, 1926, pp. 235-40.

In the following excerpt, Lucas discusses Teasdale's Flame and Shadow.

‘There is but one thing certain,’ says Pliny, with his curious mixture of matter-of-fact and melancholy, ‘that nothing is certain; and there is nothing more wretched or more proud than man.’ Human unhappiness and the pride that half causes it and half redeems—of the union of these two eternal contrasts Flame and Shadow is made. It is the utterance of a mood which all feel sometimes, some always; which all the generations have repeated, yet each of them yearns to hear expressed anew in the special accents of its own day—that particular kind of pessimism which feels the vanity, and yet the value, of life. And it needs to be restated still. For the present cannot live on the past, on dead men's words, alone...