A LETTER TO ROBERT FROST AND OTHERS, the first book of poems by Robert S. Hillyer, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, is now before the public. How poetry lovers will take to Mr. Hillyer's latest work is unpredictable, for in his lambic couplets he has attempted to sound that soothing harmony of compassion tinged with soft, self-childing satire so elusive for the reader to hear yet so pleasant when once heard and held in memory. Whether he succeeds without appearing to descend to the prosaic and the trivial depends entirely on the individual reader.

Most readers today are casual readers, and a casual perusal of Mr. Hillyer's poems will only make one feel that in many passages he has tried to imitate the criticisms of wilder moderns and in a manner faintly reminiscent of Pope:

"There by the wall a maiden poet stands, Her gestures undulant on languid hands; Each finger nail a crimson petal, seen Through a pale garnishing of nicotine. Her draperies, like downward vapor, tremble, As one by one her courtiers assemble."

But underneath a soothing harmony does pervade the whole, and lacking that harmony the verses might not be worthy of the poet.

Addressing Robert Frost, Mr. Hillyer's theme combines a gentle scolding of the state of literature and affairs with his friendship for Frest:

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall;

Your apples and my pines knew none at all,

But grow together in that ghostly lot

Where your Vermont meets my Connecticut . . . .

In war, where no one wins but the machine,

I pondered as I brought the wounded in:

Of these three choices--death, deformity,

Or patched for war again, who should not die?

And now the final triumph: the star actor

In "Steel: a Tragedy" makes God a tractor."