Books: Caverns Charted

THE ROAD TO XANADU—John Livingston Lowes—Houghton Mifflin ($6). In this book Professor Lowes of Harvard aims "to tell the story, so far as I have charted its course, of two of the most remarkable poems in English, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan.'" His chief guide in this hazardous and admirable journey is a notebook of 90 chaotic pages in which Coleridge was accustomed to scrawl the names of books which he had read or intended to read, ideas which he considered shaping into verse, recipes for ginger-wine and other...