The American hero is strong rather than symmetrical. Abounding in exuberant and ill-controlled vitality, he lacks grace and restraint. The soil of the United States, under the benign sun of democracy, has produced an abundant crop of sturdy...
How are American historians, social scientists, and novelists to cope with the vastness and complexity of American democracy? Are they more bold than wise in attempting what European writers have rarely ventured—a composite picture of a...
With Elinor Wylie the poet—I mean, with the poet who wrote in verse—I plan no traffic. I can find in her verses nothing very remarkable, but then that has for many years been my attitude toward everyone’s verses, all the long way from...
Tadeusz Różewicz is a poet of dark refusals, hard negations. He is a naked or impure poet (“I crystallize impure poetry,” he writes), an anti-poet relentlessly, even ruthlessly determined to tell the truth, however painful it may be. He...
Dissolution is not a new theme for Edwin An lington Robinson, for it was in “Merlin” that he told of a noble civilization falling back into violence and barbarism. It was the war that made Robinson feel so. In his latest and last book,...
