A Test of Poetry

A Test of Poetry (1932) is a comparative study of poetry from Homer to the twentieth century. By giving several translations of the same passage from Homer, an elegy of Ovid and lines from Herrick which read like an adaptation of Ovid, or a fifteenth century poem about a cock and a recent poem about chickens, and so on, a means for judging the values of poetic writing is established. The book also has a comparative chronological chart, including a summary of critical views.