POUND, JEFFERS, AND OTHERS
wrote about them. Moreover, he remembered that Nietzsche said, "The
poets? The poets lie too much," and he determined to tell the truth.
This did not mean a constant search for truth, in which one can go
only a little way in a lifetime, but speaking the truth he thought he
already had. He had rejected the historic, philosophic or religious values
.by which his truths could be measured, modified or developed. And so
they degenerated into mere reflexes, into the truths of the
Chicago
Tribune,
into something far uglier, far grosser politically than the truths
of Ezra Pound. Without tensions and pressures to form them, the verses
are lax in poetic line and journalistic in phrasing. Above all, since
Jeffers has separated man from nature and himself from society, truth
does not include for him the fact that his attitudes, like the attitudes
of other men, have a determining social and psychological history. His
tales of murder, torture, necrophilism and incest sound more and more
like sexual fantasies which have ceased to excite because of too unvaried
repetition. Nothing could be more wearily, uncreatively determined than
the image of "Vere Harnish/ Kneeling against the bed beside her
mother's half-naked body, pumping a pen-knife into it." Marx and
Freud, wherever their insights have been separated from their dogmas,
THE LIBERAL SPIRIT:
Essays on Problems of Freedom in
the Modern World.
By Horace M. Kallen, New School for
Social Research. The papers which compose this book deal
with a theme as old as philosophy, for human societies have
always been faced with the encroachment of ideologies of
power upon the free conscience of man. These addresses and
essays represent the reactions of a leading educator and phi–
losopher to this central conflict over a period of twenty years
during which the freedom of man has been jeopardized the
world over in ways both subtle and direct.
254 pages, $3.00.
THE THEORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.
By Howard Mumford Jones, Harvard University. Written in
Professor Jones' incisive style, this history of literary criticism
in America bypasses the preciousness of many literary historians
and deals forthrightly with the growth of literary criticism in
America from the days of the frontier, the Bible, and the
Boston Brahmins to the days of the publishing trusts, the book
clubs and the new cynicism. Tribute is paid to the men who
have made literary history a mature part of our thought and
education.
218 pages, $2.75.
Order from Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, N. Y.
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