AFTER Forsaking All Others was finished--to me the best
thing that she ever wrote--Alice began to show less and less
interest in the type of stories she had been writing for so long.
Her whole attitude toward her work changed. As her con-
tracts to the magazines expired she made no fresh ones.

She wrote love stories no longer but expressed emotion on
a higher plane, one as far removed from fiction as was her
prose from the flowing verse in which she was henceforth to
express herself.

Alice had remained unaffected by the changing styles in
modern poetry. The classic forms were those she kept before
her. Her inspiration goes back to the Elizabethans and the
great traditions of English poetry. She spoke only of the simple
and essential in life, and escaped the inquietude and dubiety
of mood that lie like a pall over so many poets of the last
hundred years.

She considered "The Revenge" one of the finest poems in the
English language, and its influence is to be seen throughout
her own poetry, particularly in the use of prolonged, heroic
stanzas broken by almost colloquial verse.

She carried the use of varying meters to express changes in
mood and thought further than did Tennyson; further, I think,
than anyone has ever before attempted in English poetry.
There is hardly a metrical form known to English composition,
from the triolet to the sonnet, that she did not make use of.

These alternating forms are employed with great consist-
ency. Her verse has a defined ebb and flow. A peculiar in-
dividuality--characteristic of all her later poems--is imparted
by this technique.

The method is essential. It is the only way possible to pro-
duce a decisive change of mood in dramatic poetry. If a single
verse form is used, no matter how varied the context, a cer-
tain monotony is inevitable. On the other hand, so powerful

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