POETS AT WORK (186 pp.)Essays by W. H. Auden, Karl Shapiro, Rudolf Arnheim, Donald A. Stauffer; Introduction by Charles D. Abbot Harcourt, Brace ($2.75)
Poet Laureate Robert Bridges once fired a snooty spitball at all highbrows who peep into the boudoir of Art and try to "explain" her naked mysteries:
They must lack vision of Art (for elsewise they had been artists, not philosophers).
Bridges' warning is apparently no longer a deterrent to science's Peeping Toms. The 20th Century analyst, says Charles D. Abbott, is "passionately absorbed in the pursuit of hows and whys,"...