"Stay Against Confusion"

J. Donald Adams is usually a mild-mannered and stolid citizen. But the more he looked at a paragraph of literary doubletalk in a current poetry magazine, the more it "acted as bellows to my smouldering disgust." He was really burning by the time he got down to writing his Sunday column in the New York Times Book Review. Wrote he: the trouble with poetry today is the way most critics write about it. "They worry at poetry like a terrier with a rat. They are bleeding it to death. . .

"[Their writing] employs a very scientific terminology; it is both muddy and pretentious, and it bears about as much relation to the essence of poetry as surgical technique to the nature of religious ecstasy. . . . They magnify beyond all measure the importance of structure in poetry."

To Critic Adams,( Robert Frost said it all when he wrote that a poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom. [It ends in] a clarification of life--not necessarily a great clarification . . . but in a momentary stay against confusion."

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