One more striking feature of our contemporary poetry is its infinite variety of aim and of technique. There exists in it no general tendency, no trend, no norm. Some of the poets are venturing into that dubious region that lies mid way between prose and verse; others stand immovable with their backs to the safe wall of the old classic verse forms; still others are running the whole gamut between the two extremes. It is a day of experiment and confusion, where tradition has lost its authority, and where revolt has not yet proved its predominance.

A reader of "Eight More Harvard Poets" will find in the volume an epitome of this general chaos. He will find that on generalization about the work of these eight men is possible. Each one of them is worshipping his own god or his own idol; and obviously the Eight do not make a harmonious congregation. This is of course, as it should be: one is glad to note that there is apparently no "Harvard School" of poetry.

It would be wrong to take a book like this either too seriously or too lightly. Perhaps a mute inglorious Milton in hidden away here; but if so, he is well hidden. On the other hand, there is much work here of an interesting and serious character, and a few poems that show real accomplishment. Certainly it is a much better book than any that could have come out of Harvard in this reviewer's day, twenty years ago.

The contributors to the book are Norman Cabot, Grant Code, Malcolm Cowley, Jack Merton, Joel T. Rogers, R. Cameron Rogers, Royall Snow, and John Brooks Wheelright. All of them, in various degrees, justify their right to a place in the volume.

Among the most interesting work is some of Mr. Cowley's. His "Chateau de Soupir" has a dry poetic wit that is delightful; and the successful capturing of atmosphere in his "Mountain Farm" makes it one of the most beautiful poems in the book.

Mountain Farm

I watched the agony of a mountain farm,

a gangrenous decay;

the farm died with the pines that sheltered it

the farm died when the woodshed rotted away.

. . . . . .

Nobody thought to nail a slat on the corncrib

nobody mowed the hay

nobody came to mend the rotting fences.

The farm died when the two boys went away,

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.