SPRING HOUND AND HORN PLEASES AND PUZZLES WITH WIDE VARIETY

The following review of the March number of the Hound and Horn was written for the Crimson by Lucius Beebe.

The Hound and Horn has of late been on the lookout for material for its pages from the pens of Harvard undergraduates and its efforts in this respect achieve notable success in the current issue. Of course it has no competition on the Cambridge scene and undergraduates seldom achieve the more established reviews, but, even so, to publish a poem as distinguished as Mr. J. R. Agee's "Anne Garner" is a rare bit of luck. It is inconceivable that any editor in his right mind should reject it.

The poem is written in some three hundred lines of blank verse and treats of a woman whose soul is one with the soil by which she lives and whose life is a symbol of the universal, earth-impelled life forces. Systole and diastole, spring and autumn are in her the same.

"Anne watched

The plunging and inexorable plow, Watched her husband guiding it, and when

The work was done and over the quiet hills

The sky glowed greenly, stealing out alone

Anne pressed her body to the raw, rich earth

And felt life swelling great against locked stones."

It is apparent that Mr. Agee has read his Robinson appreciatively, for while he has borrowed the bitter and concisely astringent qualities of Robinson's verse forms, he has no taste for epigram or obscuring his verse with inversions and periphrasis. His poem of the variant life-urge which derives from soil and season and harvest is of the earth earthy, profound and moving.

"Notes From a Soviet Diary" by Mr. Charles Sanders Pierce are mainly interesting to a student of the new cinema art. On other matters they are notably observant and fair minded, lacking the prejudiced pro or con attitude toward social Russia which characterises the writings of so many modern students and travellers.

Mr. Dudley Fitts, who can, and, on occasion, does write verse which at least scans, has contributed some doggerel which smells of the Rotunde and of which this particularly gifted critic cannot decipher so much as a line. One of its verses begins with a comma. It doesn't really seem to matter.

For Specialists Only

"The Founding of Pragmatism" is a brief but interesting article, interesting that is to logicians and metaphysicians and also to students of the college scene. In 1859 at Harvard undergraduates formed clubs for the discussion of philosophy. How times have changed.

There are also some illustrations. They might perhaps be more intelligently criticised by somebody who had at least taken a fine arts course in college, but if the picture of a sad looking fellow by Peter Teigen is really, as he says, the portrait of an athlete, well.

The thing that is puzzling about the Hound and Horn in general is the diversity of the types of its contents. There seems to be no close relationship between "Anne Garner" or Mr. Bandler's conventional and scholarly essay on W. C. Brownell and the "new art" as represented by a photograph of the roof of Memorial Hall and Mr. Fitts undercoded poem about a synagogue. As a review it is neither a Fortnightly or a transition, but something of both. A definite editorial policy could not do any great harm and it would assure readers in sympathy with that policy of matter to their taste and liking.