Volume 33, Number 21 & 22 · January 15, 1987
Small Wonder
By Brad Leithauser
Charlotte Mew and Her Friends
by Penelope Fitzgerald
Collins (London), 240 pp., £12.95
She was admired, in her quiet and tragic lifetime, by Ezra Pound, Vita Sackville-West, and Siegfried Sassoon; Virginia Woolf referred to her as the 'greatest living poetess' and Thomas Hardy called her 'far and away the best living woman poet—who will be read when others are forgotten.' A quarter of a century after her death, when her Collected Poems was published in America in 1954 Marianne Moore deemed her work 'above praise.' But Charlotte Mew appears today an all but forgotten figure, whose slender books of verse have been jostled off those cluttered, weight-bowed shelves on which we would preserve the best in twentieth-century poetry.
Review, 4099 words
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