|
|
|
|
|
Mary Webb. The Bookman Gallery. Morton Luce. [London, 1925.] Typescript of the “Bookman’s Gallery” (featured) review in the June 1925 issue of the Bookman. Six leaves, 10″ x 8″, off-white wove watermarked paper, ink corrections on each leaf. Typed at the bottom of the last leaf: “MARY WEBB. (Mrs. H. B. L. Webb.).” Webb shows herself as a knowledgeable enthusiast of Luce’s four published volumes of poetry: Thysia, Idyllia, Threnodies and New Idyllia, and comments that the sonnet sequences favored by Luce are a severe poetic medium, where spontaneity and emotion are often sacrificed to perfection of form. Despite this, Luce demonstrates metrical perfection and emotional power and “can create, from what to some minds would be a commonplace stroll over a dull bit of marshy land, so keen a loveliness that it cuts one to the heart.” Webb compares Luce’s poetry favorably to that of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and says that he is under-recognized and under appreciated—in part because of his retiring nature and the fact that he lives “remote from London, between the blue sea and the purple hills . . .” She quotes a few lines of Luce’s poetry and says: “What a marvelous line that last is, and how we should all quote and requote [sic] and go crazy over it if Tennyson had written it! And what fools we are to let fair souls live unheeded among us just because their names do not happen to have been said or shouted a sufficient number of times for us to dare to commit ourselves.” With a hand-written bibliographic note by Frederick Baldwin Adams, Jr. reading: “A carbon copy of this critical essay, with the same MS corrections, was sold to Indiana University in the George Matthew Adams sale, Oct./63 at Parke Bernet.” G. M. Adams (no relation), a Grolier Club member from 1947 until 1961, also collected Mary Webb.