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SHORTER NOTICES 211 psychologically more approachable, or to stop some of the losses and impose a disagreeable barrier,', and that "no general agreement seems possible, on the question of whether the 'open-stack' or ,the 'closedstack ' library :is preferred.'' One could wish that the book had contained an authoritaJtive discussion of this vital problem, on which certain phases of library architecture undoubtedly turn. There is, for example, no suggestion •thaJt the problem has a moral side. The open-access system not only leads Jto heavy (and sometimes irreplaceable) losses, but it also gives an unfair advantage to the dishonest and unscrupulous student. It has always seemed to the presen~ reviewer essential1that the library should protect the honest student from -the depredations of the book-thief, and under this heading one may include the student who appropriaJtes a book to himself or herself before an examination. In general, this book is rather a symposium of opinions than a pronunciamento. But no one who is concerned with •the problem-the almost insoluble problem-of the university library building of the f utuTe, whether he be tthe president of a university or a first-year undergraduaJte , can fail to derive a great deal of illumination from this report. w. s. WALLACE Essays in Criticism) 1920-1948: Representing the Achievement of Modern British and American Critics. Selected by RoBERT WooSTER STALLMAN. With a Foreword by CLEANTH BROOKS. New York: Ronald Press Co. 1949. Pp. xxii, 571. ($5.00) Poetry is made with words not with emotions, feelings, or ideas-it is that perception of Mallarme that has changed first poetic and then critical practice in the past seventy years. Readers of this volume will find that the tools of the "new criticism" were sharpened on the new poetry. Poems such as Mallarme's Igitur or Un Coup de Des are great symbolist structures which made possible the metapoetic orchestration of Ulysses, The Cantos, Finnegan's Wake, and Four Quartets. It is plain fact that nobody has ever made a successful entry into these structures by means of the aesthetic assumptions and reading habits that were prevalent thirty years ago. Yet the very presence of these works has fostered an intensive reading- discipline which has drawn its nourishment simultaneously from many fields of study. Beginning with Mallarme, poetry once more embraced the entire diversity of civilized interests. Criticism could do no less. Superficially, the first Romantics had rejected the formal methods and content of the encyclopaedic arts and sciences. But the last Romantics, such as -Mallarme) Joyce, Yeats, Rilke, and Eliot, have joined poetry once more to theology, metaphysics, history, and anthropology. 212 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY This is the sort of paradox which is a veritable signature on any intense page of intellectual history. It is like the paradoxical truism that poetry is made with words and not ideas. Far from banishing ideas from poetry this formula insists that they should be incarnate and dramatically active. That is why the new criticism is hard on those poets who have left many of their conceptions in the form of mere statements and avoided the hard technical work of digesting them into vital forms. And it explains why that criticism must on the one hand be minutely textual and on the other extremely erudite. Professor Stallman, therefore, has done well to represent the range of current critical interests rather than to reprint only examples of the best practical criticism. Much of this last kind is covered in his useful bibliography. However, his selection does represent a definite bias in favour of theoretic discussion which is a pronounced characteristic of the greatest number, though not the most influential, of American critics. And non-representation of the critical work of Pound and Wyndham Lewis is hard to understand since both have made major impact at top levels of art and criticism in this century. The art and criticism of Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Lewis stem directly from deep absorption in and development of the French painting and poetry of the later nineteenth century. The two groups make a single vortex.. So that it is not surprising to detect in the work of those who derive only...

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