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Parts of a World ($2) and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction ($3), by Wallace Stevens, were outstanding works of poetry; and small presses were responsible for the appearance of The Second World ($2.50), by the remote and excellent poet R. P.
Blackmur, Eleven Poems on the Same Theme ($1), by Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson's Notebooks of Night ($2.50), with its famous parody of Joyce and its famous garroting of MacLeish.
Stephen Spender's Ruins arid Visions ($2) gave proof that war and writing are by no means necessarily incompatible in a civil ized nation. Other notable volumes were The Witness Tree ($2) by Robert Frost, dean of U.S. poets, and Person, Place, and Thing ($2) by Karl Jay Shapiro.
Charity Begins at Home. Much U.S.
criticism followed — and on the whole lagged behind — the nationalistic lead which the late Constance Rourke set a generation ago. She took her last steps in this year in the profound inquiry into the U.S. past entitled Roots of American Culture ($3). Miss Rourke herself some times colored her valuable findings with somewhat parochial opinions; some other critics, last year, rather overdid their overnationalism. Ferner Nuhn's The Wind Blew From the East ($3) contains often very perceptive studies of antidemocrats Henry Adams, Henry James and T.S.
Eliot, but seems hardly aware of the dangers a democracy incurs which too readily rejects its skeptics and suspects its individualists. Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds ($3.75) recreates, enthusiastically, the climate of U.S. letters from the 19th Century to the present but loses, thanks to its enthusiasm, an urgently needed power of discrimination between the excellence of some contemporary authors, the hearty good intentions of others, and the mere jingoistic opportunism of still others. In Writers in Crisis ($3) Maxwell Geismar acutely dissects the U.S. writers of the past two decades, but keeps up a kind of smart patter which is apt to put off the more intelligent of his readers.
More concerned with letters than with immediate life was William Gaunt with The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy ($3), a witty history of the famous group of British Victorian painters. Virginia Woolf also, in her posthumous Death of the Moth ($3), showed her most delicate skill as a literary escapist. Harry Levin's James Joyce ($1.50), blind though it was to Joyce's grandest and plainest virtues as an artist, furnished plain readers with useful X-rays of much that was most abstruse in Joyce's genius.