PLEASURE DOME

An earnest and somewhat solemn attempt to ""provide a bridge to modern poetry for readers like myself brought up on prose"". The author is a contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature and other literary journals. He attempts first to define and then to clarify the distinguishing features of modern poetry which, briefly, he considers are immediacy and simultaneity. The succeeding chapters are devoted to expositions of such modern poets as James Stephens, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and others. These chapters are painstaking and sincere, but not illuminating. The writer is intelligent, but has no gift to translate his knowledge into form escaping the pedantic, the unimaginative. Still, for the ""lay"" poetry reader, the book provides a dependable guide.