A Treasury of Great Poems

LOUIS UNTERMEYER, who is rapidly taking all poetry to be bis province, has created an anthology which is more than an anthology. Besides containing nearly one thousand poems or scraps of poems from English and American writers, the Treasury includes enough comment on the lives and times of the poets to make a fair-sized history of English literature. In an effort to represent the entire poetic heritage of the race, the compiler has included some sixty pages of high spots from the King James Bible. Thereafter the select ions proceed in chronological order from “The Battle of Brunanburh" to Stephen Spender.

Mr. Untermeyer accords a ready welcome to light verse writers from John Skelton to Ogden Nash. The slightly invertebrate quality of the book is borne out occasionally in the editing, which is informed but not scholarly. Mr. Untermeyer has rashly rewritten a famous line by Milton to suit his own ear, he has quoted as Donne’s a stanza assigned by Professor Grierson probably to John Dowland, and he has used a snatch from Ben Jonson without indicating that it is taken from a longer poem. But these and the like are venial errors in a book that is not intended for trained readers but welcomes one and all to picnic on the slopes of Parnassus. Its “stylish stout” format expresses its easy geniality. G. F. W.