Books: Christmas with Mr. Eliot

THE CULTIVATION OF CHRISTMAS TREES —7". S. Ellof—Farrar, Sfraus & Cudahy ($1.25).

This is less a book than a Christmas card. With the help of some singularly uninspiring illustrations, the publishers have contrived to stretch the American edition of T. S. Eliot's first poem since Four Quartets—all of 34 lines long—into a book of ten pages. Eliot at Christmastime, as might be expected, is no Dickens. He opens magisterially: "There are several attitudes towards Christmas''—and proceeds to plead for the child's attitude. He cannot, of course, help noticing the cosmic worm in the plum pudding ("The awareness of death, the consciousness of...