INTRODUCTION
I do not mean that it has an obviously feminine interest. Again, one can say that personality is not exhibited. But the perceptions are a woman's perceptions. The eagerness is a woman's eagerness. The renunciations are a woman's renunciations. The wit is a woman's wit. And yet, although it is assuredly a woman's poetry, its balance dips towards thought rather than to emotion. It is a poetry that comes out of impassioned thought. Indeed I think "thought" is the word mos! often used by Gladys Cromwell. She felt herself bound and laden, but like certain philosophical determinists she knew herself free in meditation and introspection. Out of this free and dearly appreciated thought she made her poems.
In all she wrote there is an attempt to do a difficult thing—to say. What she writes is not a phrase, but a statement. Stripped of rime and rhythm these poems would have the interest of something written in a diary by a clear and a sincere soul. The world was difficult for her, but it was intelligible, as she averred in her poem "The Audience"; and this sense of intelligibility brought her to a deliberate and often to a finely achieved form.
Most of her poems are touched by a tragic vision of life—
[viii]
