are irrecoverable, and these poems of the second section are fragmentary and disconnected—but I have not included in this book anything I think he thought second rate, and have omitted a fairly long poem that I am sure he intended to be left out.
He had outgrown all tours de force, all false standards, and gone to the desperate simplicity which is so hard to reach.
He wrote verse with difficulty, but, once written, rarely made any alteration. In this he differed in an extraordinary degree from Thomas Mac-Donagh, who suffered in equal measure from a too great facility in verse writing, and would alter a completed poem repeatedly till he was satisfied that it approximated to the poem of his imagination. The poems in this book have an appearance of ease, but they were written after the author had mastered his medium and the very labour that went to their making has but made them flow more evenly and contributed to the effect. He did not consider the versifying, but the thought expressed, to be of importance, and did not put much value on his best lyrics, as e.g., the poem called “O Lovely Heart!”
Though my brother and Thomas MacDonagh differed widely in their methods of writing, their critical standards and judgments were alike. In the article “Obscurity and Poetry,” reprinted here, there is a great likeness to the character of
