Honestly, a lot of the poetry here is... not wonderful. Some of it's downright painful to read, although in fairness a lot of that, I think, is due to the age of the collection. The poems were written in the late 1890s and early 1910s, and they are very formal and very mannered - not that appealing to modern tastes. I will say that, despite the verse itself, the essential humanism of the author comes through very clearly: the title poem, in particular, is close to fifteen pages of ranting about the hypocrisy of the United States denying to other countries the freedom it won for itself, and other poems slate the destruction of poor people's homes to benefit the rich, the disdain of a young woman for an old guy who's creeping on her, and (in a series of Arthurian poems) the disloyal indifference of some of the so-called heroes. A fan of Tristan and Gawain, Mr. Adams is not.

Even so, I would have been hard pressed to sit through some of the Boston recitations of this poetry... except for one. There's one poem, by far the best of the collection, where Adams drops his tendency to flowery sentiment and in twelve short lines absolutely rips into the writer Thomas Carlyle for being an awful husband to his late wife Jane. It's almost worth reading pages full of "Of Love the minstrel sang, and drew / an easy finger o'er the strings" for that short piece of scornful bitchery.