POETRY AND EXPERIENCE (204 pp.). Archibald MacLeishHouqhton Mifflin ($4).
Poetry, as Archibald MacLeish sees it, is a little like a man who shuffles across a familiar rug and touches a doorknob, only to be pricked by an unexpected spark of static electricity. In that instant, two things happen. For one, the man "understands" electricity not as a textbook diagram, but as a felt experience "charged with meaning." For another, three disparate thingsthe man, the rug, the doorknobhave been fused with one of the cosmic forces. They have become, in MacLeish's view, links in...