September 17, 1941
The Poems of Theodore Roethke
Open House by Theodore Roethke. Knopf. $2.00 There is much in this book for which I care little, but every poet, I suppose, has a right to his own kinds […]
September 17, 1941
Hindu Tangle
The Transposed Heads by Thomas Mann. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Knopf. $2.00 Each of Thomas Mann’s large canvasses has begotten in its making a wealth of auxiliary sketches and […]
September 17, 1941
Christianity and Modern Man
The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr. Vol. 1. Scribner’s. $2.75 Reinhold Niebuhr is the most admirable kind of Protestant. This is the most convenient way to sum […]
July 1, 1941
Return of Glenway Wescott
The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott. Harper. $2.00 The reviewers of this short novel have been sympathetic toward it and quite unintelligent about it: they have had some sense of […]
July 1, 1941
More Directions
New Directions 1940 edited by James Laughlin. New Directions. $3.50. Mr. Laughlin’s new collection is larger and handsomer than its predecessors, and he says in the preface that he has […]
July 1, 1941
Rediscovery of a Radical
Spanish Character and Other Essays by Irving Babbitt. Houghton Mifflin. $2.50 It is nearly impossible to read Irving Babbitt with sympathy in 1941. He has been ticketed with too many […]
July 1, 1941
History without Philosophy
Dictionary of American History edited by James Traslow Adams. Five volumes and index. Scribner. $60.00 This work contains over six thousand articles, nearly twenty-five hundred pages: “the result of the […]
July 1, 1941
Toward a Philosophy of Language
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth y Bertrand Russell. Norton. $3.75 Language and Reality by Wilbur Marshall Urban. Macmillan. $5.50 Russel’s fairly good book and Urban’s bad one swell the […]
July 1, 1941
Constellation of Five Young Poets
5 YOUNG AMERICAN POETS George Marion O’Donnell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Mary Barnard, W. R. Moses. New Directions. $2.50 The serious publisher owes a great obligation to the new poets, […]
July 1, 1940
Mr. Lewis Goes Soft
Bethel Merriday by Sinclair Lewis. Doubleday, Doran. $2.50 In the unhappy story of Sinclair Lewis’s later career, Bethel Merriday is another and a redundant episode. To call it a […]
July 1, 1940
Among the New Books of Verse
A Turning Wind by Muriel Rukeyser. The Viking Press. $2.00First Will and Testament by Kenneth Patchen. New Directions. $2.50Confusions About X by Julian Symons. The Fortune Press (London). 3s. 6d. […]
July 1, 1940
A Marxist Critic
Forces in American Criticism by Bernard Smith. Harcourt, Brace. $3.00 Mr. Smith has undertaken his re-examination of American criticism not as an humble seeker after truth, but a metaphysician who […]