No, there is quite another “note” in Loveman’s “The Hermaphrodite.” It is the note of the Eternal. There is in his work the breath of Ineffable Beauty that soars and shudders and flashes and blazes in the souls of Spenser, Herrick, Marlowe, Keats, Swinburne, Baudelaire, Poe and Verlaine. The footprints of the phantom Helena are in every line of “The Hermaphrodite.”
Passion, sensuousness and spontaneity are inherent in this poem. In art there cannot be illusion without spontaneity. It is implicit. Because of this spontaneousness — this unfettered parade of vision and image from brain to paper — I received this rare blessing (rare in poetry nowadays) of perfect illusion. Samuel Loveman is Prospero.
His style is simple and chaste. One can easily see he is not a poet by profession. He is a poet by election, “whose footfall loosed Olympian splendour.”
BENJAMIN DE CASSERES.
