Religious Trends in English Poetry. Volume VI: 1920–1965, Valley of Dry Bones by Hoxie Neale Fairchild (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 595 including Pastorale Munus and De Episcoporum Muneribus, are appropriately employed throughout. Some further improvements over previous manuals of this type may be listed. An interesting change is the exclusive location of the tract on marilal and extra-marital chastity in Vol. I under temperance rather than in connection with Matrimony. A more extensive treatment is given to the pathological impediments to the freedom of the human act, to situation ethics, to the Christological aspect of the virtues, to religious liberty, to cooperation in sacris, to sex education. Following Pius XII the author rejects the opinion which in principle absolves youths who commit masturbatory acts from all sin or from grave sin. He supports the view that a woman who is in danger of being raped may take the anti-conception pill. Written before the publication of Humanae Vitae, the text strictly adheres to the norms of Paul VI. The author opts for a middle position on periodic abstinence, justifying it in its relationship to the finality of marriage and for matrimonial motives. The special question of overpopulation is also considered. A chapter of some fourteen pages is devoted to the question of war, with notes on the lawfulness of a preventive war and on the justice of universal conscription and of conscientious objection. In the second volume we can note the evaluation of the special intention of the Mass celebrant, e. g., that the intention of a stipend is no more efficacious than other accompanying special intentions, and that, in lieu of any other, the celebrant himself is in a way a special intention. Fr. Van Krol holds that the eucharistic fast cannot be considered to bind gravely in conscience and that devotion is a sufficient reason to celebrate Mass without a server. The bibliography of Marriage hardly cites a work appearing in the 1960's. These volumes provide a helpful post-Conciliar source book for the moral professor and useful auxiliary reading for students. Dominican House of Studies Washington, D. C. NICHOLAS HALLIGAN, 0. P. Religious Trends in English Poetry. Volume VI: 1920-1965, Valley of Dry Bones. By HoXIE NEALE FAIRCHILD. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Pp. 535. $12.50. This volume marks the conclusion of a massive work of literary scholarship . Its author, who is Professor of English Emeritus of Hunter College and who was for many years a distinguished member of the faculty of Columbia University here concludes the work of more than thirty years. It is the fruit not only of mature scholarship but also of what still may 596 BOOK REVIEWS be thought of as Christian wisdom. Professor Fairchild is not simply a learned critic and literary historian; he is a man who deeply understands both the distinctions and the close relationships between religion and poetry, lo say nothing of the same distinctions and relationships that exist between poetry and theology. It is not a book that will afford much satisfaction to those who follow fads of either the literary or the theological variety. Nor does it provide easy comfort for any who may be in search of assurances that in writers like Auden or Eliot there is evidence that " Christian poetry " can and will survive in a very non-Christian world. The book deals with English and American poets who, in the period between 19~0 and 1965, have established some claim to a place in the history of poetry. The treatment, however, is topical rather than chronological . It begins with an analysis of what its author, who is professedly an Anglo-Catholic Christian, calls "the Situation": "The modern temper. Hollow men eating their naked lunches in the Waste Land while awaiting Godot. ..." The Situation shows itself as widely pervading the thinking not only of aesthetic nihilists like Allen Ginsberg but the " cool " academic poets as well. Fairchild makes a blunt distinction between what he describes as the antithetical Christian and romantic attitudes towards the Situation: " The Christian will see it as the inevitable collapse of a false faith in man. The romantic will see it as the cowardly and perverse abnegation of a true faith in man, and he will hold the Christian largely responsible for this apostasy...