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literary means." This applies I feel perfectly to Mr. Patchen; though
the great critic now dead probably did not anticipate a writer who
would illustrate
with
equal force and at once both kinds of falsification.
The poems of Byron Vazakas are exactly the honest, not very in–
teresting sort of work that one would expect to see introduced by William
Carlos Williams, whose hospitality is a credit to the country. He says
that they are better collected than single, but I confess that, rereading
them
all
before I looked at the introduction, my feeling was just the
opposite. Together they show as clumsy, derivative, and rather flaccid;
the similes are vague, the diction is nothing. I liked better than -my of
them a poem in
Accent
last year,
Liebestod,
which Mr. Vazakas has nut
reprinted. There is a possibility of something's happening, however, and
some life around, which distinguish the book from the other "first books"
the editors sent me. These I couldn't welcome and see- small point in
damning, so I am not printing my notes on them. Not the worst was a
Scot, very up-to-date, who now and then gave the show J.way With a line
like
oh, I am lost in vast immensities-
as distinguished from the small immensities or just immensities, or just
dull vague period-style, in which the others are lost.
•TWO-FIFTY
AT ALL
BOOKSTORES
JOHN BERRYMAN
From Columbus Circle to Pershing Square, in Hyde Park or in front
of the Newberry Library, you've seen the impassioned man who
speaks on Sunday, rain or shine, to the stray, the aimless, and the
merely curious. How did he get that way? What makes him tiek? In
THE LISTENING WORLD, Reginald Moore introduces Mae, the soap·
box speaker, and lays bare a man and his mission to reveal a life that
would have fascinated Dostoevslcy.
