Tower of Bibles

Tower of Bibles

EXPRESSION IN AMERICA--Ludwig Lewisohn--Harper ($4). W7hen scripture became only literature. Literatus Lewisohn avers, "it was necessary for literature to become scripture." Modern literati are no mere craftsmen, do not play the beaux to pretty Belles Lettres. They must be poets "whom the thoughtful and instructed modern reader seeks out to experience for him. to interpret for him, to illuminate and to guide him, to face for him the inscrutable. . . ." With such vicarious help, common-or-garden men, in order to climb heavenward, need only keep their glasses polished and read the scriptures as they come.* In his impressions of the expressions of American literati, dead, alive, half-dead or simply dazed, Author Lewisohn gives the most complete modern history of American literature yet published. A little Freudian analysis goes a long way to give the story bite. As applied to Whitman, it not only bites, it goes far to clear our literature of one of its most muffled mysteries. Author Lewisohn seldom lets his religio-poetic predilections run away with him, gives good professional literary criticism by & large. The U. S. literary scene, when he is through with it, looks just about the same, though the literati look more real. For modern writers like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passes he has not much to say; prefers Hemingway, Frost, Edna Millay. The book is a reliable and compendious guidebook, though its readers will sometimes suffer from a discomforting suspicion that its author's opinions will never wither from lack of air.

* For news of religio-literary efforts--both Roman Catholic and Protestant--to help the common man. see p. 52.

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