The Ridge Road: Short Stories and Poems by Jay G. Sigmund

How Is Writing Taught?

cannot point to-we may have an "order" but we are not
sure of having a literature.
  The power to seize and use the right elements of a tradi-
tion in any age is still the power of individual genius; and,
although genius can do nothing without the "order," I think
that Mr. Leavis does not see that he has only the other half
of Mr. Pound's truth. Perhaps I do him wrong; it seems
to me that Mr. Leavis is slightly tainted with the esthetic
utilitarianism of Mr. I. A. Richards: that the right edu-
cational methods will do everything. A third pamphlet in
this controversy might be entitled: How Mr. Pound, if he
were as good a pedagogue as Mr. Leavis, might teach Mr.
Leavis to write poetry. Allen Tate
                 BRIEF NOTICES
High Mowing, by Marion Canby. Houghton Mifflin Co.
  Publication is not success. On the contrary it is some-
times a fatal error for a poet whose judgment is not yet
ripened to receive easy and indiscriminate acceptance. De-
prived of the usual editorial censorship, good and bad poems
may be jumbled together in a first book, creating an unfor-
tunate impression on the critical reader. Mrs. Canby should
have delayed her volume until it could contain more poems
of the sustained quality of This Day and Windy Will.
The Ridge Road: Short Stories and Poems, by Jay G.
  Sigmund. Prairie Publishing Co., Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
 Mr. Sigmund is using material with which he is familiar,
and which with any attention to the inherent beauty of
poetry. The first poem in the volume is called Grubber's
Day, a title which might well have been used for the whole
volume.
The Kid, by D. P. Berenberg. Macmillan Co.
 Ever since The Set Up by Joseph Moncure March, less
able writers have been trying to muscle in on the racket.
Most of them should be summarily taken for a ride, but
Mr. Berenberg is apparently capable of better things. He
should be given a chance.

                  NEWS NOTES
 As we go to press, the editor of POETRY is escaping the blizzards
and all other responsibilities under the tropical sunshine of the
southernmost tip of Florida.
 The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry, founded through the
bequest of Miss Mary A. Sears and consisting in the annual interest
on $20,000, has this year been divided between Lola Ridge, the
author of Sun Up, Red Flag, and Firehead, and Frances Frost,
author of These Acres and Hemlock Wall. The last two poets
honored by this award were Stephen Vincent Benét, in 1933, and
Archibald MacLeish, in 1932.
 Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thompson's opera, Four Saints in
Three Acts, which had its first performance at Hartford, Conn.,
early in February, has since found considerable popular success
in New York. A distinguished poet who saw the performance
in Hartford had this to say of it: "While it is an elaborate bit
of perversity in every respect-text, settings, choreography, it is
most agreeable musically; so that, if one excludes esthetic self-
consciousness from one's attitude, the opera becomes a delicate and
joyous work all round."
  Cloyd Head, the author of the poetic play Grotesques which