Books: Poetry, Sep. 14, 1942

RUINS AND VISIONS—Stephen Spender —Random House ($2).

Stephen Spender is the youngest member of the famed Oxford poetical quadrum virate of Spender, Auden, Lewis & MacNeice. For more than a decade these prestige-puffed young Lefties have been writing about their life and times with the authority of youth and political desperation. Most of them have had a high old time at it. But the quadrumvir who seems to have enjoyed himself least and to have done his work most painstakingly is Poet Spender.

Spender, in 1942, is a poetical miniature of the English literary...