Our Contemporaries.

WANDERING about in the cul-desacs of esotericism, the young writers whose several courses are the consideration of "Destinations" present such divergence of purpose that they discover no very clearly marked thoroughfare for American letters. But under the ruling hierarchy of Dreiser, Mencken, Robinson, and Anderson, Mr. Munson finds an approaching aridity that fresh blood must eventually dispel. And so, in the present volume, with a respectful acknowledgement of the critical importance of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, and an estimation of Dreiser, Robinson, and Lindsay, he attempts, in a series of essays on Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Williams, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, and Jean Toomer, to resolve the future. Mr. Munson writes these appreciations with un- derstanding, but in a workable argot, at once colloquial and technical, that is not, in its strict attention to the details under consideration, designed for the pleasure of the casual reader.

The work of Irving Babbitt and Paul More is pessimism for the present and preparation for the future, an establishment of inclusive standards at na time when national literature has run aground in the twin streams of unapplied realism, and unrelated, subjective aestheticism. Agreeing with these critics, Mr. Munson still seeks the seeds of renaissance in the attempts of the young writers he cites. In its broader aspect, this attempt is unconvincing. The youthful obfuscations, artful vignettes though they often are, are such weak voices crying in dissonance with the other weak voices in a wilderness of theory and abstraction that the significance which Mr. Munson doughtily reads into them approaches an amusing incongruity. Nor are his admissions of faults an encouragement to the reader to seek out his writers, or to seek in them a progressive future. As a critical discussion of these authors, Mr. Munson's book is extremely capable; but in its advertised aspect as a standard setting moulder of the coming literary decade, "Destinations" seems completely inconclusive