POETRY

The kudos for poetry went entirely to old hands. The work of younger poets, many of them'wrapped in the academic cocoon of teaching, was downright dreary. The year saw the publication of the collected poems of Wallace Stevens, a Hartford insurance executive who puts a high premium rate on intelligence, but pays off as solidly as an annuity; and of E. E. Cummings. the aging enfant terrible who can be soaringly lyrical, typographically cute and earthily human, all in a dozen lines. It was depressing to think what U.S. poetry would amount to when these men as well as Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers and William Carlos Williams--all over 60--stopped writing.

HUNGERFIELD AND OTHER POEMS, by Robinson Jeffers, remained true to the pessimism and clear distaste for humanity that has long been Jeffers' trademark; it also included some ringing tributes to nature, was stamped with a character as firm as the boulders Jeffers admires.

MINE THE HARVEST, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, consisted of 66 poems left by the passionate lyricist of the '20s when she died in 1950. No Greenwich Village candle burning at both ends here, but mature contemplation of man and nature and the sad imperfection of both.

THE DESERT MUSIC AND OTHER POEMS, by William Carlos Williams, was the maturing of a poet who has not always been easy to take. Completely American, completely on the side of man with all his imperfections, these were poems in celebration of man's humanity to man.

UNDER MILK WOOD, by Dylan Thomas, was pronounced the richest theatrical event of the season by at least one Manhattan critic when the late Welsh poet rendered it as a barstool reading. In print, it emerged brilliantly as an earthy, mockingly tender account of a village's single day of living, loving and leaving, recorded with a devoted hi-fi ear for the sounds of speech, of the sea and of the soul.

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