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He says, "When swung to him the voices were insolent enigmas, tripping him as he stood midway between fright and indifference. . . . His rages were false and sprang from aloof thoughts chanting over their chains." Sometimes a pentameter line which is the accidental essence of the eighteenth century. "The stunted messengers of trembling thought." Oftener his accumulation of images resembles Shakespeare, and still more often that early and underestimated model of Shakespeare's, John Lyly. Only, Bodenheim is if possible more euphuistic.
Maxwell Bodenheim . . . Euphues . . . not "a second Euphues"—for he is no imitator—but Euphues simply; American prophet of the new preciosity (and with many disciples). If I were Max Beerbohm and making his caricature, I should draw him in mandarin robes, posing on a torn dictionary and somehow leading a cotillion of empty champagne bottles and tomato cans. It would not be a very consistent portrait.
In his latter volume Bodenheim has included, in addition to the poems, a number of "poetic short stories." The word poetic, as usual with him, means "full of metaphor," but here it carries another meaning also; it means that these stories are fantastic, improbable, ironic. Furthermore they are remarkable for containing no real characters and for distilling no emotions except wonder and (I borrow the word) a sort of windy sadness. They are not an attempt at creating or reproducing life, but a literary criticism with faint unimitative memories of Jules Laforgue. They are an impromptu banquet of words, a verbal pyrotechnic: pin-wheels, Roman candles, sky-rockets, giant firecrackers that hiss and sometimes explode; afterwards the memory of a boy's Fourth of July with green apple colic and the smell of burned powder. They are by no means negligible stories.
Another innovation in this latter book is rhyme, which Bodenheim once utterly despised. He rhymes awkwardly sometimes, as if he were the captain of the P. H. S. eleven making his first tentative verses. He puts "boy" at the end of one line and "toy" at the end of the next; he peppers half a dozen words before each of them without much regard for rhythm or metre, and calls the result a couplet: