or maybe lived till the lone old man was buried

but after it was dead I loved it more

though poison sumac grew in the empty pastures,

though ridgepoles fell and though the fall winds whistled

all night through an open and empty door.

It is unless to quarrel with Mr. Cowley's eccentricities of capitalization and punctuation; for, after all, these things are only a convention, and of importance only as they help or hinder the expression of the poetic idea. But their danger is more obvious in other of Mr. Cowley's poems, where a desperate effort to be "modern" at any cost takes heavy toll from his sense of beauty. The evil effect of this strained modernism, this pursuit of superficial novelty as an end in itself, is of course more operative in all the arts today,--though there are at least a few signs, in painting, that the artists are beginning to discover that it is more original to copy Matisse than to copy Raphael.

Mr. Joel T. Rogers is another of these poets whose work is of outstanding interest. He has a fine vigorous ballad manner, in his best work, that it very attractive. And he does something that not all young poets do,--he writes as if he really had something he wanted to say to us. His poems are too long to quote here; but the reader will do well to look him up in the book.

Mr. Norman Cabot writes with a pleasant hardness and bite of intellectual irony; and Mr. Grant Code is adept in showing his reader a kaleidescope of vivid and colorful details. Mr. Wheelright displays a cleverness which would perhaps be more at home in prose than in verse; and Mr. Merton writes with the neatness, if not with the power, of a Landor. And, finally, in Mr. Snow and Mr. R. Cameron Rogers one finds serious effort toward a self-realization which is not yet quite accomplished, but which holds good promise. Altogether, the book is more than a Harvard anthology; for it is typical of that mixture of sincerity and affectation, and art and assininity, and success and failure, which characterizes the poetry of today.