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describing Freud's later years, are by far the best. The story of his forti–
tude in the face of repeated operations for cancer of the mouth during
the final decade of his life is tragic. The description of the escape to
England and Freud's last day.s there ends the account.
This biography affords a picture of Freud the everyday man which
only those who knew him by personal contact over a long period could
provide. Even the special pleading can be penetrated if the reader is so
inclined. It is not, after all, necessary to agree with the author in his
conclusions, and the frankness--one might almost say the naivete-with
which the book is written makes one less reticent about taking such a
discriminative approach. Until, therefore, the definitive biography which
Sachs promises from the hands of Freud's daughter Anna is available,
the present little book, along with the similar fragmentary sources that
as yet exist, will have to suffice. Anna Freud will, one hopes, have less
to defend and will, one may be confident, have more to reveal.
SAuL RosENZWEIG
OUR PERSON OUR WORLD
THE WINTER SEA.
By Allen Tate. The Cummington Press.
$5.00
&
$10.00.
PoEMS, NEw AND SELECTED.
By Richard Eberhart.
The Poets of the Year. New Directions.
$1.00
A PoET's YouTH.
By Allan Dowling. The Wanderer Press.
$2.50.
CvT
IS rHE BRANCH.
By Charles E. Butler. Yale University Press.
$2.00.
THIRTY PoEMS.
By Thomas Merton. The Poets of the Year. New
Dirutions.
$1.00.
A MASQUE OF REASON.
By Robert Frost. Henry Holt
&
Co.
$2.00.
A WoRLD WITHIN AWAR.
By Herbert Read. Harcourt, Brace
&
Co.
$2.00.
R
EVIEWERS, THE glib order, are likely to attribute the works of most
of our present-day poets to the works of three or four others. I am
not speaking of serious literary critics, the few and far-between, but of
those who feel no responsibility to inquire into far-flung aboriginal
sources, those who are never so happy as when they are pigeonholing
works which have, in reality, little relationship with Auden, Yeats, Hop–
kins, Eliot, the most convenient points of reference, as if they were
mariners' stars. Great injustice has been done to modern poetry in the
hands of such reviewers. The intellectual layman must see it depicted
constantly as a static quantity. My argument is that more reviewers are
long-haired than poets, more reviewers than poets inhabiting, in these
days, the dusty attics of Grub Street. This has always been the case.
Whatever mistakes I may make, I shall at least evade the equation of
every poet with a few others who by the glamor of their reputations
command a respect they are surely tired of.
Our age is devoid of one informing myth. Our poets may
be
con-
