John A. Holmes

By bringing together some seventy of his recent poems, Mark Van Doren, while continuing old themes, makes it clear that he has interested himself in a new theme for poetry. Psychologists might call this new preoccupation empathy, an intense and subtle identification of the poet with the structure, pattern, direction, mass, and plane of material things in all their variations and combinations.

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, "King Jasper," he returns to this point of view, having in the meantime studied and re-studied the involved psychological effects of death on small groups of characters.