THE PURSUIT OF POETRY

A prodigious anthologist's Guide To (Poetry's) Understanding And Appreciation With An Explanation Of Its Forms And A Dictionary Of Poetic Terms, which is just what it is. A constant reader and connoisseur of poetic art, Untermeyer has written a sort of leisurely manual on the subject, lavish with examples familiar and obscure, full of detailed technical lore (the dictionary section ranges through nearly 200 items, from ""Abstract-Poetry"" to ""Virelay"") and decorously tempered enthusiasm. However, readers with a lively sympathy for modern and contemporary poetry may be bothered by the conservative flavor of this book. Minus a paragraph here and there, it Could almost have been written forty years ago, As it is, Untermeyer's scanty discussions of movements and innovations since Imagism are pretty uniformly stiff and cantankerous. He seems most in his element when attending to poems of the 19th century, which he does often and with enthusiasm.