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To the relief of his literary admirers, Archibald MacLeish dropped his wartime role of political soothsayer and returned, in some sections of Act five, to the personal lyrics he had once sung so well. From England came the apocalyptic chants of Edith Sitwell, who had journeyed a long way from her early preciosities. Her Song of the Cold contained some good war poetry. (It was a year in which America became Sitwell conscious, and the touring Sitwells discovered America. Osbert Sitwell sketched an acid portrait of his delightfully eccentric father in Laughter in the Next Room; Sacheverell, youngest of the literary family, celebrated the minor arts of peace in The Hunters and the Hunted.)
Other books of verse by older writers: Robinson Jeffers' crabbed The Double Axe, which most critics resented for its arrogant, unyielding isolationism; Paterson, Book II, a homey description of small-city life by William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey doctor who versifies between paying patients; Mark Van Doren's pleasant New Poems.
A few younger poets were worth reading: Randall Jarrell's Losses, an honest try at putting wartime experience into verse; John Berryman's The Dispossessed, technically impressive but marred by self-pity ; Peter Viereck's Terror and Decorum, flippant and satiric.
In literary criticism, the ambitious new "American Men of Letters" series began a restudy of the country's major writers with Joseph Wood Krutch's well-balanced Henry David Thoreau and Emery Neff's Edwin Arlington Robinson. In Nathaniel Hawthorne: the American Years, Robert Cantwell gave an unorthodox interpretation and filled in the background of Hawthorne's time with a rich mass of detail. Randall Stewart's Hawthorne was a more conventional biography.
It was also a year in which literary figures were allowed to speak for themselves: Andre Gide's Journal, Vol. 2, rich with evidence of the creative mind's way of work; Franz Kafka's morbid Diaries; Anton Chekhov's plain, warm Private Papers; Edwin Arlington Robinson's letters in Untriangulated Stars which told the painful story of an American poet's struggle for survival.
*Real name: John Cobb Cooper.