Books: Doctor's Output

Six SIDES TO A MAN—Merrill Moore— Harcourt, Brace ($2).

When Poet-Critic Louis Untermeyer went through Dr. Merrill Moore's filing cabinet, he counted approximately 25,000 idiomatic, hybrid or "American" sonnets. Some were bad, some good; some had been printed in Walter Winchell's column, some had appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript, some in Harriet Monroe's Poetry: A Magazine oj Verse. To conceive of the tremendous industry that could turn out 25,000 sonnets, says Mr. Untermeyer, "one must think of the author as a pundit, an immured octogenarian, devoting all his hours to the fashioning...