Books: Stay Against Confusion

J. Donald Adams is usually a mild-mannered and stolid citizen. But the more he looked at a paragraph of literary doubletalk in a current poetry magazine, the more it "acted as bellows to my smouldering disgust." He was really burning by the time he got down to writing his Sunday column in the New York Times Book Review. Wrote he: the trouble with poetry today is the way most critics write about it. "They worry at poetry like a terrier with a rat. They are bleeding it to death. . . .

"[Their writing] employs a very scientific terminology; it is both...

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