BJ. William Plomer

31. Deutsch, Babette. ‘A Contemporary Mind’. Review of The Five Fold Screen (1932). Nation (New York) 135 (1932): 373.

Plomer’s poems in The Fivefold Screen do not make use of Japanese materials, but Deutsch nonetheless turns to consideration of Japanese poetry in reviewing them, finding that the ‘chief lesson’ of Japanese verse is its ability to achieve with ‘small means’ a ‘capacity for bringing home to the reader the peculiar quality of a given hour’, but that Plomer ‘has not quite mastered’ this.