INTO this volume Lord Vansittart has collected poems from the
earliest to the latest period of his writing. He is best known for his recent poetry in which again and again he warns the present generation to avoid the mistake of thinking the Germans redeemable as individuals or as a nation:
. . Lay out the season's Slaughtered!
The Slayers are the same.
Lord Vansittart has been bitterly attacked for his uncompromising denunciation of the Germans, but there must be a greater number of people today who will agree that his view of them is neither so distorted nor so difficult to agree with as they once thought. The early poems are vers d'occasion, including a juvenile verse play .on 4 mediaeval theme. The middle period mostly comprises a series of poems inspired by oriental and Levantine scenes and travellers' tales. The first hint of the present vein comes in the poems written on the death of his brother and his friends killed in the 1914-1918 war.
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