Books: Poetry

MAKE BRIGHT THE ARROWS—Edna St. Vincent Millay—Harper ($1.75).

Last month Edna St. Vincent Millay was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She plans to spend the coming winter—as if in an attempt to holystone an overstuffed literary position—verse-pamphleteering about current events. The lyrics she has written in 1940 forbode Millay-things probably to come.

In Make Bright the Arrows Millay lashes out at the warring world like a lady octopus caught in a whirlpool. Giving her native impetuosity and her Vassar graduate's well-educated illusions and disillusions free play, she writes her verses mostly in three...