BOOKS
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profit in speculating about the kind of writer he might have become
had he turned away from his bookish culture and yielded to his natural
bent. "The failure of his 'earnest' verse," Mr. Duberman remarks, "may
have been largely the result of attempting to squeeze a joyous tem–
perament into the fashionable prophetic mold." Lowell, he continues,
"was far more comfortable---and original-as a humorist, and it was as
humorist, ironically, that he was also most successful as a moralist."
He agreed with his contemporaries, however, that humorous poetry was
a low form of art at best and kept his natural spontaneity and irrever–
ence in check. A less inhibited or more alienated man, similarly endowed,
might have produced bolder and better work.
Some time during his middle years, Lowell composed his own
epitaph:
Here lies that part of
].
R. L.
That hampered him from doing well.
Mr. Duberman's penetrating and urbane analysis, in bringing out
Lowell's amiable character and substantial if trammeled talents, re–
enforces the suspicion that in the Mount Auburn tomb "lies infinitely
more" than Lowell ever wrote.
Daniel Aaron
THE NEW CLASS
ORGANIZED LABOR IN AMERICAN HISTORY. By Philip Taft. Harper
&
Row. $12.50.
Strictly speaking, there are no new classes. Society is confined
within a fixed perimeter that encompasses upper, lower and middle. But
within the perimeter shifts can occur that are so profound as to be
revolutionary. As a group moves within a society onto a different class
level, there is not created a new class; an established class is changing
its membership. And while the new members may affect the collective
personality of the class-if only because they enter it with the differences
of the
arriviste-deeper
and more permanent is the impress of the class
personality on its new recruits. Movement from one class to another may
come only through civil warfare when it requires the displacement of
those with the strength and will to resist. Or it may be achieved with
less violence when resistance is less stubborn, as can be the case when
