Books: A Matter of Arrangement

A STONE, A LEAF, A DOOR—Thomas Wolfe—Scribner ($2.50).

Readers of the late Novelist Thomas Wolfe's prose have sometimes felt that they were reading poetry. Sergeant John S. Barnes has tried to prove it by ar ranging passages from Wolfe's books as verse.

Wolfe's crowded and tumultuous sen tences shape themselves naturally into rhapsodic verses. Most ambitious poem in the collection is the eleven-page This Is Man, a portrait of the human creature whom "it is impossible to scorn." More winning are the lyrics about the seasons and the weather and their way with man on the earth he loves.

Wolfe's familiar voice as a...