led to Crowley's early feud with him. The last piece, Tannhäuser: A Story of all Time, ends Crowley's amateur stage and tells the legend of the Christian knight Tannhäuser, already expressed by Wagner. Crowley's source for the tale was probably the occult scholar Arthur Edward Waite. Tannhäuser in the play leaves his Christian community and his childhood darling Elizabeth for the mysteries of Egypt and the God beyond time. Oddly, Crowley once stated that this play contained the theory of special relativity only Albert Einstein usurped the phenomenon in 1905 by being more blatant. Collected Works Volume II 1906 The second volume showed Crowley's maturing poetry and plays of 1902–1904, with the second half of this book breaking into many prose works based on his new-found interest in nineteenth-century philosophy and Buddhism; keeping in mind that Crowley claimed to receive The Book of the Law from the intelligence Aiwass about this time. Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden and The Goetia were not included in this volume. CONTENTS The first work to appear in this volume, Oracles: the Autobiography of an Art, is like a little collected works in itself and contained Crowley's backlog of poems from 1889–1903, including an unfinished Buddhist classic the Dhammapada, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (also unfinished) and some from Green Alps, his teenage collection of mountaineering poetry. Alice, an Adultery however is a sign of Crowley's maturing poetical skills (as well as again his love of adultery) and claims in the introduction to have been passed him in MS. form from the dying lover of "Alice" on his journeys in the East. It is written in the form of fifty sonnets numbered from the first day to the fiftieth and laments the poet's desire to make love with a married woman. The Sword of Song was a major breakthrough for Crowley as it was the first to refer to himself as "The Beast" without any reticence as regards his critics, and the cover daringly had "Aleister Crowley = 666" written in Hebrew. It was basically a work based on Robert Browning's Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and itself contained two long, likewise-colloquial poems called "Ascension Day" and "Pentacoste", both quite anarchic and unreadable because of the constant use of neologisms, disenjambment and punctuation, the poems really set way by means of hundreds of footnotes for collected prose witticisms in the back (even the line-numbering, going up