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Yeats said, I believe, that English to be elegant must be written as if it were a foreign language. That is the fashion of Maxwell Bodenheim; his English verse has the accent of another civilization; the words lisp slightly and thereby acquire a charm which greater writers before him had worked savantly to create. One remembers the majestic Latinity of Milton; the overtones of Italian in Rossetti, of Gaelic in Synge, of French in Macaulay and George Moore. Bodenheim follows none of their precedents, but still remains foreign; he writes English as if remembering some learned book of Confucian precepts.

His verse is Chinese. It does not resemble Chinese poetry; it is not a direct and unfigured commentary on nature; quite the contrary. It is Chinese in etiquette rather, being stilted, conventional to its own conventions, and formally bandaged in red tape. It is a social gathering of words; they have ancestries and are over-bred; they know the precepts of the Law and take delight in breaking them. Meeting together they bow too deeply, make stiff patterns on paper or silk, relate their adventures in twisted metaphor and under an alias, sometimes jest pompously behind a fan. They discovered irony late in life.

Bodenheim is master of their ceremony and arranges it with an agile fantasy which takes the place of imagination.

Poetry has been based on rhythm, rhyme, syllable-counting, alliteration, repetition, and some fifty other linguistic devices. Bodenheim makes it depend almost wholly on figures of speech. His poems are a dictionary of metaphor, arranged in unalphabetical order. If he had chosen to write, "When she played too loudly a man in the next room knocked on the wall," he would be writing prose. He says instead, "An acrimonious man in the next room often remonstrated with the wall when her piano conversed too impulsively."