BOOKS
357
To those people, and to their "cursed" and "enchanted" land, Miss
Gordon has given her complex attention. The countryside has come off
rather better than the people. Miss Gordon is marvelously sensitive to
the looks of things, animals, movements, changes of light and color; she
has spent on their delineation a scrupulous care that springs from aware–
ness and devotion, and they reward her, and us, by having dimension,
vividness, life. Nothing could be clearer than that she is the complete
countrywoman, horsewoman, connoisseur and able raconteur of the kind
of stories that abound in large families (and especially in southern
families). But as her black Maria says: "There is no use in telling every–
thing you know, especially if you know more than other people." She
has, in short, let her love rest too heavily on the trappings and suits, and
not enough on the perception of the movement in the soul, the moral
change, the "internal difference where the meanings are."
GERTRUDE BUCKMAN
FOUR POETS
NEWS OF THE PHOENIX.
By A.]. M. Smith. Coward-McCann.
THE BIG TIME.
By Alfred Hayes. Howell, Soskin.
$2.50.
1 X
1.
By E. E. Cummings. Henny Holt.
$2.00.
SELECTED POEMS, 1923-1943.
By Robert Penn Warren. Harcourt,
Brace.
$2.50.
O
F
THESE four books, three belong in style and feeling to the tradi–
" . tion established in the twenties and thirties. The
fourth~is
rather a
case of he wou'd if he cou'd; this is the case of Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith
appears to be a competent writer who has not yet found either a style
or a subject of his own. The bulk of the poems in this volume are Geor–
gian in manner, but a variety of styles and attitudes are represented.
Sometimes Mr. Smith writes on "the worth of a hard thing done per–
fectly" in the middle style of Yeats; sometimes he asserts in the manner
of Auden, and with a now melancholy assurance, that
Each shall choose his place,
Be Dead, or Red;
there is even
i
poem modelled on the "Give, Sympathize, Control"
passage in "The Waste Land." But you are left in the end with the
feeling that Mr. Smith is still most at home with the Georgians.
Mr. Hayes, on the other hand, has perhaps too thoroughly as–
similated his influences. He is presented to us by his publishers as "a
warm-hearted dramatist," an antidote to "the pale cerebral poetry of
the modern esthetes." I suppose this account of him is the blurb-writer's
notion of how to appeal to that audience of which Mr. Cummings re–
marks that it
does nothing except preexist
its hoi in its polloi.
