Books: Poets Old & New

AMARANTH—Edwin Arlington Robinson—Macmillan ($2).

POEMS—Stephen Spender—Random House ($1.50).

POEM—W. H. Auden—Random House ($2.50).

Modern poetry, like experimental science, is always precocious to its day. Even William Wordsworth was once a misunderstood modern, a reprehensible revolutionary. Edwin Arlington Robinson, who last week published his eighth quiet narrative poem, was never considered a blasphemer of the literary gods, but once he was more modern than he is today. Now distinctly a member of the old guard, thrice crowned with the perishable bays of the Pulitzer Prize (1922, 1925, 1927). Robinson is by long odds the most...