James Laughlin IV is a sort of Lorenzo de' Medici. Scion of a steel mill family, he has centered his interest since graduating from Harvard in 1937 in sponsoring young, unknown poets and writers and giving them a chance to see their works in print. For some four years his annual anthology, "New Directions in Prose and Poetry," has contained some of the more interesting, if startling, contributions to modern literature. No ordinary publisher would accept them, for chain poems and their ilk are not designed as money makers. Laughlin can afford, if necessary, to take a loss.

From the anthology, which proved successful despite the radical nature of its contents, he branched out to other fields. Regularly his "Poet of the Month" pamphlets appear, some of them significant, practically all of them unpublishable in the usual business sense of the word. The Modknown nook on the top floor of Widener, will have twice as many other names.

Until the vacation the Poetry Room, that little are Classics are another of his experiments, a series of inexpensive reprints of modern works which Laughlin considers of lasting value. Rimbaud, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Andre Gide are among the names included or planned for inclusion. A third series, The Makers of Modern Literature, is composed of what Laughlin terms "critical guidebooks" to the great modern authors--Joyce, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Lorca, Baudelaire, and a list of on display some of the products of New Directions Books from the years of its infancy to its present flourishing state. Books, pamphlets, letters from the authors, and pictures are combined to create a rather interesting survey of a little known phase of modern literature.

The number of Harvard names included in the catalogue of Laughlin foster children and in the exhibit is gratifyingly large. Poets of the Month have included Theodore Spencer, associate professor of English; Harry Brown, roughly '40, whose contributions still appear spasmodically in the Advocate although he himself is in the army; Dudley Fitts '25, until this year a master at the Choate School; Delmore Schwartz, Briggs-Copeland instructor in English Composition; and John Wheelwright '21. Harry Levin's study of James Joyce is about to come off the press, and the display includes a letter from Joyce to Laughlin praising the Faculty Instructor's interpretation of some of his work.

John Berryman, one of Laughin's "Five Young American Poets" of 1940 is now an instructor in English here. Philip Horton, another English instructor and curator of the Poetry Collection, has a volume on Rainer Maria Rilke scheduled for next year. Fitts has done other work for New Directions, including half the editing of an anthology of Latin American poetry on the docket for next spring. Schwartz has one full-size book already published and two more planned in the near future. Perhaps a connection with Harvard might even be traced to New Directions' prize eccentric, Henry Miller, who contributed a story from Paris to the Advocate when Laughlin was at the head of the magazine. The immediate result of Miller's contribution was the banning of the issue.

Harvard names aren't the only familiar ones included in the New Directions catalogue. There is material by such varied talents as Kay Boyle, Confucius, John Donne, Flaubert, Goethe: and Ezra Pound, to mention only a few.

The creators of the Poetry Room exhibit ran into one difficulty in the planning of their displays. They wanted to obtain letters to "Jay" from all the writers concerned, showing examples of their most informal work. Unfortunately, this task was not so easy as it might sound. Collecting the letters was simple enough, but it was quite a job to glean the proper ones for the exhibit. It appears that the average poetry writer of today, when he is producing in his odd moments, customarily uses a vocabulary that is not fit material for the Harvard Poetry Room.