In this poetic manifesto, L.P. Hammond draws upon the strength of nine virtues that "stand with regal fierceness/in the temple of the soul" to declaim a series of potent images evoking the terrible power of the spoken word "made prisoner yet found libertine within the printed page". With raw lucidity and untrammeled honesty Hammond delights and broods, exults and swoons, laments and extols the "lonesome pilgrim toil/across a vale of misery bedeviled/where the winsome and the wise/sip a common wine/from chalices too potent for distempered/frolicsome humankind/whose limp disguise renders meaningless/every whinging grimace/in poor display at the pantomime war/within a gloomy soul lost in its own dismal shade." Nine Acanthus Pillars sets forth not merely a new tone in his poetic canon, but signals a call to inner examination of our own principles that guide "as poor lanterns/creaking bleakly in a snowstorm/of our own blind desires".