War is Kind (1899)

Summary

“New Books.” New York Sun, May 20, 1899

The century is nearly closed, and Stephen Crane may be said to be just in time with his volume of age-end poems entitled “War Is Kind.” The poet has departed from an earlier and distinguished device, and the new poems are not printed in capital letters; still the presentation of them is sufficiently peculiar and comports with the great strangeness of the poems themselves. They are printed in pale type on gray paper, with vast spaces of paper only, and Will Bradley has illustrated them in a conscientious and most becoming manner. Mr. Bradley's picture of a horse dying in a castle moat, on page 29, is one of the most remarkable things in the line of pictorial endeavor that has ever come under our observation. With his right pair of legs the dying steed is scratching himself, while the left pair stick straight up as though calling heaven to witness that here is a horse that has made his 2:40 and never been harnessed to a milk cart. The shaft of a spear protrudes from the breast of the curiously expiring animal. The castle, enlivened by two shoots of gladiolus, towers grimly aloft and trees resembling shad roes decorate the symmetrical top of a neighboring cast iron mountain.