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as not, he translates and explains within his text. He has not relinquished
his own rules for "the serious artist." He has never been a writer for
the lazy reader of verse. He may confuse a few of his admirers; but he
will never bore his readers.
If
Pound has never lost the affection of his friends in Italy, it is
because he shares with them "a rage for order" as well as the drop of
anarchy that stirs in Latin blood-and to them also, he represents the
gentleman of the "old school," poet and man of letters of the first
order, and in that line, the heir of Walter Savage Landor and of
Robert Browning. They are not wrong. Pound may be trusted to
conform to no convention of suburban origin.
Horace Gregory
UNREAL RADICALISM
IN SEARCH OF HERESY.
By
John W. Aldridge. McGrow-Hill. $4.00.
In almost any other period one would assume that a writer
undertaking a social criticism of contemporary literature would show
more than a passing interest in the structure of society, in contem–
porary history, and in the motives of political ideology. Now Mr.
Aldridge is a critic who has made much of the writings of the "lost
generation" in the aftermath of the First World War, and one might
have expected him to concentrate in this new book on the historical
conditions of American literary life in the past ten years. From the
creative writers themselves we have had more than a hint of that mad–
dening reluctance to face up to the real experience of the past decade,
a reluctance which has made us more and more dependent on critics
and social analysts for our sense of the world we live in. Actually Mr.
Aldridge, who likes to speak for the younger generation, permits him–
self the same immunity as the creative writers, so that when he turns
away from the literary values of the post-World War I novelists-the
only values he seems capable of responding to-he too turns to critics
and social analysts for his view of the world.
The bulk of
In Search of Heresy,
subtitled "American Literature in
an Age of Conformity," is made up of five essays on contemporary
literature and society, or rather, on literature and on certain writings
about literature and society, mostly Lionel Trilling's and David Ries–
man's. The remainder of the book consists of five shorter pieces, of
negligible interest, on Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, Ira Wolfert, James
