Books: Gentle Host

GUEST BOOK—Witter Bynner—Knopf ($1.50).

Among U. S. literary groups, the writers who have settled in New Mexico have a reputation for being the most humorless of the lot. But in Witter Bynner New Mexico can claim at least one poet who knows and appreciates a joke, and who has the distinction of being the author of a major literary hoax. In 1916 when U. S. excitement over free verse, imagism, vorticism, and other strange movements was red hot. Author Bynner, in collaboration with Arthur Davison Ficke, dashed off a few nonsensical poems,...