Ben Belitt

English Pastoral Poetry. By William Empson New York: W. W. Norton and Company. $2.50. Readers of William Empson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity" will soon discover that a good deal of his case for the "pastoral process" in his most [...]

"Keep Innocency!" —”Walter de la Mare They smile in ceaseless manna fall, Flutes, and the quills of wings, Who bear belief, like coronal, And tender tokenings; For these, an upstart whim has cast The laughing paradigm That binds [...]

Battery park: high noonSuddenly the old fancy has me! Suddenly, Between flint and glitter, the leant leaf, The formal blueness blooming over slate, Struck into glass and plate, The public tulips, treading meridian glare In bronze and whalebone by the [...]

Is not the level shine of steel Honed to the littleness of hair Sufficient implement to deal A stroke to lay the spirit bear? The hurt lies not so recondite As point may drive, or probe explore, Yet, though the blade drink long or light, The fever ki [...]

"Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain;escape to the mountain lest thou be consumed. And Lot said unto them: Oh, not so, my Lord. . . ." Fleeing its childhood havens And spent wit [...]

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Now let me bear in mind against a colder Gesture of the grass, a scanter bough, Some meadow starred with laurel, to the brow, Some hillside wearing primrose on her shoulder. Darkens, the brief heart, and the pulses smoulder; Yet shall the mind b [...]

50 Poems. By E. E. Cummings. Duel!, Sloan and Pearce. $1.50. The Broken Span. By William Carlos Williams. New Directions. $1.00. The End of A Decade. By Harry Brown. New Directions. $1.00. Open House. By Theodore Roethke. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.00. Se [...]

(Atlacomulco) "And His raiment was white as the light." THE invisible life that sleeps in the grossness of things and feeds on the bulk of the world, bringing substance and weight and degree— the tumescence that traces a thread in the loins to the [...]

1 Seeing that dangerous mover, we remembered the hazards of walking, again: the mastodon's trick of stacking his spine on its child's box of blocks; the mantis's walking-stick; or the equilibrist bearing down with the webs and the soles of his feet, [...]