VERSE: Lindbergh

THE SPIRIT OF ST. Louis—Edited by Charles Vale—Doran ($2). After Charles Augustus Lindbergh’s airplane had carried him safely to Paris, there occurred an immediate and overwhelming outburst of bad poetry. Even the more hardened practitioners of this difficult art found their emotions titillated; more than 3,000 of them sent verses to a prize contest conducted so as to determine who had written the best poem about Lindbergh. The three prizewinning poems, and the 97 next best now appear in a book: The Spirit of St. Louis. Five hundred dollars, the first prize, was very appropriately awarded to child-prodigy Nathalia Crane. She expressed 14-year old enthusiasm in a thoroughly competent narrative poem, The Wings of Lead, pointing, in lines that have a bright startling thread of childish ingenuity drawn through them, to “. . . The beauty of a courage that can raise the wings of lead.” Second prize went to Poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril, third to Poet Babette Deutsch. Poet W. R. Benet’s Lindbergh is adroit and satisfactory. The other poems vary from slightly above the mediocre to the incredibly poor.