The poem in Shove's collection referred to most often was "The New Ghost", a mystical tale of a departing soul met by the Divine in a springtime setting. It has an almost conversational rhythm.Dreams and Journeys p. 37. It was among four chosen for Georgian Poetry 1918–19, and in 1925 it was set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams as one of his Four Poems by Fredegond Shove.Sheet music. In typifying the poetic trends of the time, the introduction to An Anthology of Modern Verse (1921) noted "that something like a return to religion is in process."p.xxxii. Robert Strachan in his Edinburgh lectures on contemporary writing called it "a very remarkable short poem... unique in modern poetry",The Soul of Modern Poetry (1922), pp. 245–258. Herbert Palmer too identified Fredegond as a religious poet on the strength of "The New Ghost" – "one of the best half dozen poems in the book".Post-Victorian Poetry (1938), pp. 277–278. It also appeared in The Golden Book of English Poetry 1870–1920,London 1922, p. 326. the Anglo-American Home Book of Modern Verse (New York 1925), the Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1940) and Twentieth Century Verse (Toronto 1945). In 1958 it returned in another Anglo-American anthology: Modern Verse in English 1900–1950.Edited by David Cecil and Allen Tate, p. 345.
