The Power of the Passions and other Poems was a 19th-century poetry collection written by Katharine Augusta Ware, and published in New York City and London.
A few months before she died, Ware published, in London, a selection from her writings, under the title of The Power of the Passions and other Poems. The composition from which the volume has its principal title was originally printed in The Knickerbocker, for April in the same year. In his The Female Poets of America, Griswold remarks that this, though the longest, is scarcely the best of her productions, but it has passages of consider able strength and boldness, and some felicities of expression. She describes a public dancer, as:
and there are many other lines noticeable for a picturesque beauty or a fine cadence. In other poems, also, are parts which are much superior to their contexts, as if written in moments of inspiration, and added to in laborious leisure: as the following, from The Diamond Island, which refers to a beautiful place in Lake George:
and these lines, from an allusion to Athens:
or this apostrophe to sculpture, from "Musings in St. James's Cemetery":
These inequalities are characteristic of the larger number of Ware's poems, but there are in her works some pieces marked by a sustained elegance, and deserving of praise for their fancy and feeling as well as for an artist-like finish.