As the founder and editor of Poetry, Miss Monroe has established a reputation for criticism that is both vigorous and refreshing. Most of the essays in this book first appeared in Poetry and they naturally reflect some phases of the editor's experience. Miss Monroe considers first Poets of Today- Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Edna Millay, Sara Teasdale, and a dozen others. Although rather brief, the sketches have the quality of etching their subjects upon the reader's memory with such vivid lines as "Edgar Lee Masters, huge, careless, profound; laughing loud, suffering beyond reason, plunging deep into life and giving out liberally, fiercely, with a gusto of humor and passion, whatever he finds of beauty or ugliness, glory or shame;" "Amy Lowell, whom the Lord made a great executive and the muse seduced into poetry;" and "H. D., strict in perfect line like a Greek statue." A unique essay is "Eliot and Sarett: A Contrast," inspired by reading T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land" and Lew Sarett's "Box of God" in the same afternoon. Miss Monroe thus describes the two poets: "T. S. Eliot, delicate-fingered, sensitive-minded, afraid of draughts; looking at the world through windows, through books, through proud old gateways; feeling its unreality as it dissolves be

fore his protected eyes in a chaos of foolish loves and witless wars;" and "Lew Sarett, bold hunter and forester, kin of Indians and mountain lions, who hangs his harp in the wind and wrestles with the angel - or demon for his poems."

There are eight studies of Certain Poets of Yesterday, from Chaucer to Walt Whitman. A group of Comments and Queries includes essays on Poets the Self-revealers, The Poet and the Composer, The Poet's Bread and Butter, etc., with some memories of Amy Lowell. Of the four final essays on Poetic Rhythms the last deals with the Free Verse Move

ment.

There is food for debate in many of Miss Monroe's statements, especially when she suggests that Edna Millay may perhaps be the greatest woman poet since Sappho, that “one may as well begin by granting Miss Lowell everything but genius," and that "there is no such thing as success, and failure is the lot of all, the soul's dignity being measured by the grandeur of its failure rather than by the littleness of its achievement." Not the least thought-provoking is the essay, "Remove the Glamour," in which Miss Monroe claims the movement to get rid of war is immediately the poet's business. "For poets have made more wars than kings, and war will not cease until they remove its glamour from the imaginations of men. . . . Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, and suddenly a rotten thing, long

ready for death, was dead. Let some poetor perhaps a number of poets in a number of arts stab with laughter or scorch with tears the rotten hulk of war, and suddenly the world will know that war is dead."

Evidently Miss Monroe does not agree with the genial philosopher, Professor Durant, of Columbia University, who thinks that America is suffering not so much from suppression as from expression! In the essay, "Flamboyance," she gives us this picture of America: "America, sitting respectably at home with its newspaper; America, suppressing its feelings and censoring its artists; America, fearing emotion as the gateway to perdition - America finds the flamboyant in the courts, and listens to every passion-molded word uttered to judge and jury in Reno or New Brunswick or South Bend." B. M. S.

ADVENTURES IN EDITING. By Charles Hanson Towne. 239 pages. Cloth. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1926.

To be an editor and a writer was the earliest dream of Charles Hanson Towne and how thoroughly he has made it a reality is shown by the distinctive place he occupies among literary men.

At the age of eleven, Mr. Towne entered the publishing world when, with another boy, he established the Unique Monthly. A comparatively few years later found him with the Cosmopolitan, actually beginning his active career as editor, novelist, poet, and writer of unusual travel books. Now comes his latest book, "Adventures in Editing." It is happily named, for Mr. Towne finds the business of editing a zestful adventure and the essence of it all is in his narrative. Although in a sense autobiographical, it is the record of literary New York at a time when most of the great modern magazines and writers were in the making. Mr. Towne knows them all and it is an unforgettable, intimate picture that he presents of John Brisben Walker - a pioneer who, like S. S. McClure, paved the way for the present prosperity in the magazine

WHO'S WHO IN LITERATURE. Literary Year Book. Edited by Mark Meredith. 353 pages. Cloth. Liverpool: Literary Year Books Press. 1926.

Since 1897 Mark Meredith has edited "The Literary Year Book," and issued it in a single volume up to 1922. Since 1923, however, it has been published in three sectional volumes and in much more convenient form. This volume is one of the series and we recommend it as a directory of distinct service, especially because it gives the books of the authors with the years of publication.

A DICTIONARY OF MODERN ENGLISH USAGE. By H. W. Fowler. 742 pages. Cloth. London: Humphrey Milford; New York: Oxford University Press. 1926.

H. W. Fowler, joint author of "The King's English," "The Concise Oxford Dictionary," and "The Pocket Oxford Dictionary," now provides another volume which is an illuminating discussion of problems that concern every writer. Mr. Fowler has no patience with pedants who try to turn English into an exact science or an automatic machine. In several parts of the book he points out that illogicalities and inaccuracies of expression tend to be eliminated as a language grows older and its users attain to a more conscious mastery of their materials. Especially readable are the articles on the use and mis-use of French words in English writing and talk, hyphens, inversion, metaphor, split infinitives, and subjunctives.

George Harvey has sold the North American Reveiw to Walter Butler Mahoney, a New York lawyer and brother-in-law to Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University. Mr. Mahoney will take control of the magazine with the December issue. The policy of the magazine will remain unchanged, and Mr. Harvey, who has been its editor for twenty-eight years, will continue as an occasional contributor.

The Living Age is now published semi-monthly, instead of weekly as it has been for more than eighty years. There will be no change in the editorial staff or in the policy of the magazine, which will continue to be devoted to the presentation of foreign opinion. Thomas Hardy, who is now eighty-seven years old, recently made a trip from his home in Dorchester to London to see a special benefit performance of John Drinkwater's play, based on Mr. Hardy's novel, "Mayor of Casterbridge."

The alumni of the University of Kansas are raising money for the endowment of a poetry prize fund, from the income of which three prizes for the best poems by undergradutes will be awarded annually. The fund is to serve as a memorial to the late William Herbert Carruth, who was a graduate and a Faculty member of the University, and whose poem, "Each in His Own Tongue," has been translated into practically every European language. Contributions for the fund should be sent to Miss Edith H. Snow, 57 West Twelfth street, New York.

The John Newbery medal for "the most distinguished contribution to American children's literature during 1925" has been awarded by the American Library Association to Arthur Bowie Chrisman for his book, "Shen of the Sea." The Newbery award was first given for the year 1921 and went to Hendrick van Loon for "The Story of Mankind"; the 1922 award went to Hugh Lofting for the "Dr. Doolittle" stories; the 1923 award went to Charles Boardman Hawes for "The Dark Frigate"; and the 1924 award was given to Charles J. Finger for "Tales from Silver Lands."

"Over My Left Shoulder," by Robert H. Davis (D. Appleton & Co.), is a series of reminiscences by the editor in chief of the Munsey publications.

"Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative," by Emory Holloway, is published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

"The Life, Work, and Evil Fate of Guy de Maupassant," by Robert Harborough Sherard, is published by Brentano's.

"The Golden Age of Music," by Henry T. Finck (Funk & Wagnalls Company), is an autobiography. The first of the new Médailles de la Langue Française, conferred by the French Academy upon foreigners for works in French judged to be "remarkable for form, style and ideas," has been awarded to Warrington Davis, an American author who lives in Paris and writes in French, for his novel, "Le Sacrifice de Paul Clermont." Doubleday, Page, & Co. publish an English translation of the book.

"The Letters of Maurice Hewlett, to which is added a diary in Greece, 1914," edited by Laurence Binyon, with an introductory memoir by Edward Hewlett, is published by Small, Maynard, & Co.

"Novelists We Are Seven," by Patrick Braybrooke (J. B. Lippincott Company), gives sketches of E. Temple Thurston, May Sinclair, Gilbert Frankau, Hugh Walpole, Ian Hay, W. B. Maxwell, and Rebecca West.

"In Quest of the Perfect Book: Reminiscences and Reflections of a Bookman," by William Dana Orcutt, is published by Little, Brown, & Co.

"Words Ancient and Modern," by Ernest Weekley (E. P. Dutton & Co.), gives the etymological and human origin interest of such words as agnostic, blackmail, magazine, monitor, pagan, Philistine, sergeant, skate, wealth, and yeoman.

"Poetry of the Nineties," compiled by C. E. Andrews and M. O. Percival (Harcourt, Brace, & Co.), is an anthology, including the work of forty-one poets, with a chronological list of the more important works in drama, novel, and poetry published from 1890 to 1900, and a brief biographical note on each poet represented.

The newspaper "A B C" of Madrid, Spain, offers a prize of 50,000 pesetas (about $7,600) for the most convincing proof that Cristobal Colon, better known in America as Christopher Columbus, was born in Spain. The project has the backing of the Spanish government, and essays should be sent before April 1, 1927, to the offices of "A B C," Serrano 55, Madrid, Spain.

"Graded Exercises in News Editing: A Course in Newspaper Methods and Standards of Copy Reading and News and Feature Story Structure," by George C. Bastian, Copyreader on the Chicago Tribune, is published by the Macmillan Company.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., has issued a new and revised edition of "Some Newspapers and Newspaper Men," by Oswald Garrison Villard.

For some months now I have been limited by a disagreeable precedent to the first-personplural on the editorial page. Finally I have rebelled. Henceforth, in this space, I shall be a first-person-singular.

The other day, came a letter from J. Graydon Jeffries, of Carbon, Indiana. You may recall that he won the first prize in the "You Are Now Entering" contest last month. It reads: "It was with much surprise that I received your letter with check, informing me that I had been awarded first prize for October in your contest. I feel that it is a great honor, as this is my first victory. You can realize the encouragement it has given me.

"And the money was a godsend for I am a cripple and needed money for medicine. I am a helpless invalid and have lain flat on my back for three years unable to move. My thanks I cannot express even in part."

Being an editor gives one a spidery feeling. Not that editors relish catching and devouring the false hopes of unsuccessful contributors caught in the web, as some think, but because we are each of us in the center of a network of threads of interest, of communication of ideas. And something more than mere ideas, for often comes a message like this, electric with the warmth and shocking power of human suffering and hope.

That same "switch-board" feeling comes also to him who holds an administrative office in a university, but always there the web is more closely knit. You don't have to project yourself through space; the student is sitting in front of you; you can watch his expression, reach out and touch him if you will.

I am honored by this editorial in the New York Times of September 25.

Writing in The Independent, Mr. William D. Kennedy insists that "the teaching of English composition should be the keynote in the education of every student who is headed for a business career." The hard-hitting, cigar-chewing type caricatured as the "business man" is giving way, he says, to men versed in the subtleties of expression. In some instances he is even replaced by the scholar in business. In recent years Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other universities and colleges have given much attention to the question of teaching English. The great difficulty is that some sort of "mass instruction" is necessary in order to reach the large numbers who require special training in composition - not to mention spelling. Yet despite a certain amount of individual instruction, it is doubtful if the average graduate fresh from college today is more capable of writing or dictating a simple statement or letter clearly and easily than were the graduates of a decade or two ago. Many of them could not even produce the straightforward "business English" type of letter, couched in stereotyped phrases.

One of the troubles in the teaching of better English in schools and colleges has been that the study has often been looked down upon by the students as superfluous. Although willing to devote hours to mathematics or history, they have felt that it is not necessary to apply themselves to anything so common as the use of words. At the opposite extreme has been the attitude that good writing is possible only for the elect. Rare, indeed, are the teachers who have taught high ideals in the use of language and yet have helped the "average" student to learn how better to express himself.

and space is not solved by mastery of EngOf course, the problem of abolishing time. lish Composition alone. But it helps.

Have you been following the careers of men and women who start as cartoonists and end as writers? The newspaper comic strip is apparently becoming a training ground for authorship and what a strange one!