Caverns Charted

THE ROAD TO XANADU--John Livingston Lowes--Houghton Mifflin ($6). In this book Professor Lowes of Harvard aims "to tell the story, so far as I have charted its course, of two of the most remarkable poems in English, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan.'" His chief guide in this hazardous and admirable journey is a notebook of 90 chaotic pages in which Coleridge was accustomed to scrawl the names of books which he had read or intended to read, ideas which he considered shaping into verse, recipes for ginger-wine and other paraphernalia of a profound and poetic intellect.

It would seem unlikely if not impossible that such a journey would remain a pleasure jaunt as well as a pilgrimage for more than 600 pages. That such is the case is due to the fact that Author Lowes is a scholar and an artist, as well as a keen literary detective. All the mad metaphors, the wild and cloudy symbols of two great poems are traced back through Coleridge's labyrinthine mind to the illuminating confusion of an almost illegible scrapbook. The caverns measureless to man are charted and fingerposted. The sun rises on dark castles and the sunless sea.