Ariadne (poem) "and both story and verse have a breath-taking rapidity that is wholly admirable." He regretted, however, that Lucas had not used language in the modernist way, with obliqueness and ambiguity. "The Listener" did not share this regret: "While preserving the great metrical tradition," its reviewer wrote, ""Ariadne" is a continuous refreshment of it, and is free at once of archaic pedantries and modernist affectations." More recently, Simon Tidworth in "The Quest for Theseus" (1970) believed that making the Minotaur Minos in a bull-mask was "a real stroke of originality", but, comparing the two works, preferred Nikos Kazantzakis' drama "Κούρος, ή
Bacchus and Ariadne (poem) Ariadne" was toned down and contained a "sociability" that was mentioned in the preface of Hunt's "Foliage". When placed into a sequence following "Hero and Leander", the "Bacchus and Ariadne" is a consolation to the themes of the first. Bacchus is able to save Ariadne, whereas no one was able to save Hero. Hunt relied on the story from Ovid's "Heroides" to base his poem, but Hunt describes an end result to the story that Ovid leaves untold. A major connection between Hunt's and Ovid's version is that they begin at sunrise. Ovid uses the sunrise to show that Ariadne