"Mr Masefield is to be congratulated on a remarkable achievement--a
vital portrait of a man, the drama of a great spiritual conquest, and
many passages of high beauty."--_Spectator_.
"This is probably the most important addition to English religious
poetry since Francis Thompson wrote 'The Hound of Heaven.' 'The
Everlasting Mercy' is the story of a conversion; not the 'interesting'
conversion of some cultured and introspective Agnostic, full of wise
saws and modern instances, but the sensational, primitive, catastrophic
conversion of a village wastrel, violent alike in body, mind and soul--a
drunkard, poacher, bully and libertine.... In it Mr Masefield has
accomplished two separate things. He has written a superb poem, swift
in its pace and vivid in its phrasing, and produced as well a
psychological document of surpassing interest.... He has brought the
flaming torch of beauty to light the dry processes of the religious
psychologist."--EVELYN UNDERHILL in _The Daily News_.
"Here, beyond question, in 'The Everlasting Mercy,' is a great poem, as
true to the essentials of its ancient art as it is astoundingly modern
in its method; a poem, too, which 'every clergyman in the country ought
to read as a revelation of the heathenism still left in the land.' ...
Its technical force is on a level with its high, inspiring thought. It
makes the reader think; it goads him to emotion; and it leaves him alive
with a fresh appreciation of the wonderful capacity of human nature to
receive new influences and atone for old and apparently ineradicable
wrongs."--ARTHUR WAUGH in _The Daily Chronicle_.