SOURCE: "Alexander Smith and the Poetry of Displacement," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 129-45.

In the following essay, Cronin asserts that A Life Drama reflects the life-long despair Smith felt at not being part of the exclusive poetic circle of England.

Bound up with A Life Drama in Alexander Smith's first volume is a poem called "An Evening at Home."¹ The title with its promise of cozy domesticities is glumly ironical. Forty miles to the South is Ayrshire where Smith was born, and a lost dream of peasant community, "The Cotter's Saturday Night."² Even farther away, is another dream, an evening party in an English country house, wine flowing, wit, poetry and song, and the daughter of the house looking with melting eyes on one of the guests, penetrating through the bitter world-weariness of his manner to the sensitive, passionate soul that subsists beneath.³ Smith's evening...