The Bookman, May 1923, Vol. LVII, No. 3, pp. 345-346
When the late James Huneker described De Casseres as “the most audacious, erratic Imagist of them all”, he stated a clear case with one possible exception. The “erratic” might have been italicized. In “The Shadow-Eater” (American Library Service) De Casseres proves conclusively that he is most of all erratic. He is, deliberately or unintentionally, an etcher cribbing Nietzsche, and were he not such a distinct personality himself, his results would be convincing. As it is, through these incoherent, strangely obscure poems, there runs a pattern that chameleon-wise adopts a different hue with each twist and turn. Versatility might serve as a pigeonhole for De Casseres if it were not that he concerns himself with the several subsidiary angles of only one fantasmagoric viewpoint. Wallace Smith, illustrator of Ben Hecht’s “Fantazius Mallare”, has in his one drawing for this book fallen completely under De Casseres’s devastating spell.