Books: Ditty Bag

EUROPEAN WITNESS (246 pp.)—Sfephen Spender—Reynal & Hifchcock ($3).

European Witness is a ditty bag of impressions collected by Poet Spender on a tour he made through Germany (with a dip into France) for the British Government in 1945, "to inquire into the lives and ideas of German intellectuals, with a particular view to discovering any surviving talent in German literature."

If Poet Spender discovered any such talent, he makes no mention of it. European Witness is in the main a routine travelogue. It has flashes of fancy poesy ("poignant deep-green fields through which homesickness seems to bleed with a dark stain of greenish...