B
0 0 KS
257
In poem after poem, in one bitter sentimentality after another, Aragon,
"swerving" from the war to the "shadow of her" he loves, bewails the
war's violation of his personal life:
Ah, speak to me of love, waves, little waves
For even the heart in shadow has its cries
Ah, speak to me of love. W e spend the days
Doubting, foreboding, writing to ourselves
Ah, speak of love while letters make their slow
Round trip from Paris to this wilderness.
The phrase "parlez-moi d'amour," sounded insistently throughout this
poem, by evoking the bathos of the popular song, is intended to create
a bitter and pathetic irony, but ends up by merely being bathetic itself,
when Aragon surrenders to the very emotion at whose expense the irony
was intended. And this is so in spite of a tendency, particularly in the
translations of Humphries and Cowley, to disguise the more indulgent
sentimentality of the original French.
There is an unseemliness and lack of proportion in these wild and
extravagant lamentations. The poems manifest, though quite elegantly,
the same paranoiac infantilism that characterized so many of the soldiers
of this war, who conceived of it as a vast conspiracy solely intended to
frustrate their personal lives:
•
EDUCATION FOR MODERN MAN
By s 1oNE y HooK
"One who wants a sane appraisal of present
problems, controversies, movements, philosophies,
in the field of education will find the need met
in Sidney Hook's EDUCATION FOR MODERN
MAN. It is wisely sane because Modern Man along
with the deficiencies, the possibilities and issues
of his education is placed in the wide perspective
of human history. On its critical side, it is an
antidote against the prevalent short-span views
(often frantically expressed) that proceed from
opposite camps. On the constructive side, the
proposals put forth are sane, not because they
are a half-and-half compromise, but because they
issue from a firm grasp of all the factors of the
situation. Those who desire serious understanding
of present controversies and issues, of present
defects equally with present promises of improve–
ment, will find this book without par. We shall be
fortunate if it becomes a guide-book for public
understanding and public active effort. It clarifies, it illuminates one of the
most confused aspects of the confused situation of Modern Man." JouN DEWEY
THE DI A L PRESS
NEW YORK
$2.75
•
