Books: Poetry & Criticism

Van Wyck Brooks brought to a close, in The Confident Years, the most comprehensive literary history of the U.S., and Edmund Wilson, in The Shores of Light, produced the most readable book of literary criticism. A model of balanced critical estimate in small compass was English Novelist Angus Wilson’s Zola.

U.S. poets, for the most part, were still busier writing about poetry than writing poems. In Country Sleep showed the talented Dylan Thomas flinging about some of his typically brilliant Welsh images. But the poetic service of the year was done by English Scholar Nevill Coghill. His modern-verse translation of The Canterbury Tales might yet restore the great old yarner to the common reader.