Gilbert K. Chesterton and his Poetry

Gilbert K. Chesterton is an essayist, a novelist, a dramatist, a debater and a poet. But many people -- his brother, Cecil Chesterton, did for instance -- believe that he is first of all a poet. And certainly it is in his poetry that his characteristic style is most easily recognized and defined.

Mr. Chesterton and the late Henry James are not very often thought of as intellectual or spiritual brothers. And yet there is a startlingly obvious resemblance between these two writers. Both are stylists; both have thoroughly mastered certain peculiar methods of speech, and both are, it must be confessed, hampered by their undeviating loyalty to these methods.