POEMS AND PERSPECTIVES.

By Robert H. Ross '38 and William E. Stafford.Glenville (Illinois): Scott, Foresman andCompany, 1971. 633 pp. $5.95.

In this anthology the poems from the Middle Ages to the present are slanted towards permissive teachers and permissive students, but the critical essays prevent them from enjoying indolent laxness. With absolute criteria of excellence waived, some poems may be charged with indefensible eccentricity, unwarranted cacophony, and inexpert balance. The book chooses not to prescribe, convert, or even suggest a single right and wrong way to read a poem. A sustaining point of view is lacking; controversy is welcome. Authorities may disagree, like Bentham with Wordsworth and Pound with Plato. Selected from many schools, critical pieces, free-ranging, should guide a student by giving him clues, but experience cannot be transferred outright. A student must honestly adventure for himself and after preliminary analysis muster courage enough" to make his own hard-earned evaluations.

The editors have wisely avoided poems too linguistically archaic or too modernly eclectic to permit spontaneous communication. They have chosen to omit footnotes as tending to kill integrity. Judicious enough not to throw their own academic weight around, they favor moderns. The emphasis is on contemporary language by which undergraduates may express themselves with more integrity than when indoctrinated by conservative and conventional textbooks.

Of the 95 poets represented in 201 pages, most are given only one or two poems. Exceptions: Hopkins, five; Hardy, six. Students will consequently be unable to learn about or lean on biographical oddities and literary backgrounds. Even dates are omitted.

Neophytes must be given some critical tools, and 46 critical essays by a wide variety of authors run to more than 400 pages in the second section entitled "Perspectives." They are divided into five categories: The Uses of Poetry: POETRY TODAY; The Quality of Poetry, SOME DEFINITIONS; The Process of Poetry: SOME ANALYSES; On Judging Poems: THE CRITICAL ACT; The Power ofPoetry: SOME HISTORICAL VIEWS. The last suggests the variety which gives the anthology such spice. Cheek by jowl, Socrates in The Republic and Thomas Gradgrind murdering the innocents in HardTimes (the Dickens' novel) hardly see eye to eye about poetry and truth.

With poems and criticism the volume makes a nice adjustment between the spontaneous vernacular and the permanent and standard language existing between Miltonic ponderosity and Madison Avenue slickness. After reflective consideration of poems, some students, to their surprise, may discover the differences between emotional immaturity and rational sophistication.