ADVOCATE PROSE IS POETRY SAYS CODE

(The following review of the current number of the Advocate was written especially for the Crimson by Grant Hyde Code '18, Instructor in English.)

The current number of the Advocate shows considerable literary feeling and very creditable literary attainment. The curious quality about it is that although the bulk of the text continues to be formally prose, almost the entire spirit of the writing is poetical. The prose spirit scarcely appears except in the reviews, the editorial "Now That Mem is a Memory", and in the extended satire "Logic, or The Evangelical Ventriloquist", notwithstanding the maturity and power of prose narratives by Mr. Smart, Mr. Edmonds, and Mr. Finney. In the editorial on the closing of Memorial Hall, the voice of the Advocate joins the crowd, muttering revolt against the powers that control the university. After administering a sensible old fashioned antidote to the recent sentimentality, the writer points out hat considerable power of directing university policy exists in undergraduate hands, ready to be exerted whenever those who have the power choose to think and act instead of grumbling at policies which the discontented have been too indifferent to shape.

Subway Rides Important Says Finely

"Logic", by John Finley Jr., builds upon what is also a sound basis of critical thought. "The really important things," he says, "are those we face daily. A subway ride, for instance, is much more vital than a crisis, a great transaction, and things like that, because people spend more time in the subway than they do in crises. To be interested in crises, which rarely or never occur, and to be bored in the subway seems idiocy to me. So a college which teaches you to be successful in the crisis but a failure at amusing yourself in the subway is wrong." This is both delightful and intelligent, but most of the embroidery of "Logic" is either pure dada, or epigram that does not bear directly on a central theme of criticism. Yet the sketch is in the general spirit of prose, and in a particular spirit that is suited to the American genius and the genius of the day. It does not take refuge in faint reproduction of past prose glories.

Fail to See Prose Values

Unlike this sketch, the three prose narratives are not prose in conception, excellent as is the detailed style in each. "The Iron String" by Charles Allen Smart condenses the material of a novel into reminiscence, as introduction to a pretty turn of direction in mood that might have been the perfect idea of a lyric. The treatment of material indicates a failure to see the prose values of material and the sort of prose effect that it is possible to obtain with given material. But if one accepts the misapplication of lyric form, the management in detail is powerful. "The Hanging of Kruscome Shanks" by Walter D. Edmonds Jr., comes much nearer to being a short story. In detail the story commands prose style, but in general effect it compromises between the study of a social group that is the proper field of one sort of novel, and the creation of the mood that is lyric. The centralization of poetry is substituted for the very different centralization of prose narrative. This peculiarity, though is curious rather than important, for the mood created is impressive and the means used are well controlled. "Ten Years and a Minute" is still more frankly a lyric in prose, developed largely through poetical prose description. Here the absence of prose effect is more insistent, the concluding rhapsody of the judge and the fantastic turn of mood in the mind of the condemned, more obviously not prose. Yet the style, charming in every detail, shows power for prose. Only the prose intention is lacking.

The poems, as might be expected, show considerable range within the very real and living poetic spirit. "Rondeau" by Whitney Cromwell is a light but charming illustration of the escape into Paganism and pastoral pleasantness that has characterized a good deal of Harvard poetry. Mr. Cromwell has the vision and the command of musical technique without the full transformation into poetry that greater power over words themselves gives to a poem. He depends rather upon the delights of image and music than upon the more distinctly literary delights of diction. Just this quality of exciting power in phrase is strong in "Romantic Melancholy" by J. A. Abbott. "Angled twigs, skeletons of the summer, the gust surges through the trees in floods, the smother grief, and smother hope lest disappointment grieve, the range of hissing sea foam as its creamy lines slide down the sand"--almost every phrase is in itself alive with a sort of electric thrill. "Sharon" by Stuart Ayers is pleasantly young, pretty, musical in the ear that listens to "something singing over the hill". The pastoral images are there again and the wistful feeling that escapes "over the hill". Content with these elements of poetry, Mr. Ayers depends on simplicity of statement for his effect.

Different from all these writers, Ralph Manheim in "Ballade" captures a good deal of Coleridgian magic, and incidentally refreshes a form often too much like a metrical exercise in other hands, by a variation that gives it something of the fluent melody of terzarima. John Sherry Mangan, an enthusiastic an energetic experimenter, indicates something of the range of his work in two sharply contrasting poems: "Disoriented", sapphics in which a strictly classic treatment of form encloses a romantic elaboration and decoration of feeling; and "the Passing of Shaughnessy" which fuses the fantasy and conceit of pre-classical phrasing in English poetry, a music that has the sureness of old rhythm and the freedom of new, and a nervous presentation of story conspicuously modern. Last of all, John Marshall in "Poem", curiously classic and free of tradition at once evokes briefly the feeling of dreams fascinating because too tenuous for sharp perception. And after the last, I find lost among the pages of proof given me for review, "Farewell Chorus" by Howard Doughty quite sure in technical command except for a jarring rhyme of "patter" and "Satyr" for which he should be drawn and quartered if not burnt at the stake. Within the form, however, lives much natural beauty that realizes the Pagan life for which young poets cannot help being wistful