The Spiritual Aspects of the New Poetry

THIS book starts very hopefully from the realization that poets are apt, by a kind of divination, to be the first to register the profound tides that move society and culture. Poetry is both a criticism of life and a testimony to life; it is ‘ the mirror in which the world can know itself, and in which it can read its deepest dilemmas and its deepest omens.’ The author realizes also that the technique of contemporary poetry reveals the modern age and temperament in a way impossible tor traditional forms. But he leans too heavily on the work of other critics in the working out of his thesis, and the reader is wearied by perpetual quotation and reference. The last chapter forsakes the actuality of the poetic evidence, and is a plea for a new basis for art founded upon the tradition of liberal Protestantism.