EROTOCOSM, SUBTLETY AND POWER

Seldom is a publisher's "blurb" anything more than a mere blurb--a kind of mixture of a botch and a burble. but in the case of "After Disillusion" we have before us something different. The "blurber" here displays" considerable thought and considerable analytic power, and we congratulate Mr. Selwyn on his staff.

"These poems," we read, "combine to an unusual degree the vigorous philosophy and keen vitality of the younger generation, with a clear but subtle, and exquisitely wrought beauty of form. Robert Wolf is almost the only young man whose poetry displays, in highly masculine terms, the strength and symmetry so sharply exemplified in the work of America's newer women poets." We doubt if this short book of twenty-three poems could have much better criticism--of the favorable kind.

It could have much worse. There may be many who will shudder at the sonnet beginning.

"Lost in a labyrinth of gentle limbs

At the same time others may thrill. Both emotions are unnecessary. The eroticism in the book is not so dreadfully crass, and what there is of it generally serves but as a background for a subtle parable. Subtlety and power are indeed more evident in these few verses than in most of the modern American poetry we have read. Coming back once more to our friend who writes in red ink on the wrapper, we can supplement his generalities with particulars. For in many of his lines Mr. Wolf strikes chords strangely similar to those touched by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sarah Teasdale. But always he is masculine as we might expect of one who in a short but varied career has been at different times army officer, instructor of economics, reporter, radical propagandist, vagabond, and poet.

And all through runs a vein of anger and bitterness. The title itself is biter, and the dedication to "Certain poets, friends of mine (all but one)" is still consistent. While each poem seems conceived in wrath and dedicated to irony, he does not dodge invective; see his remarks to "The Public" beginning:

"Great sluggish idiot with slobbered jaw". And "Eve" and "song Heard by St. Anthony" show him not deficient in imagination.

If Mr. Wolf would leave behind just a little of his eroticism, and keep all else that he has, we should be tempted, perhaps to talk of a modern John Donne. But pehaps he would be insulted.