Books: Post-Oxford World

STARTING POINT—C. Day Lewis—Harper ($2.50).

In the minds of most U. S. readers, England's Oxford Poets—W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Michael Roberts, Christopher Isherwood, Rex Warner — are lumped together not only because they are contemporaries, but for: 1) their viewpoint (a sort of oblique communism), and 2) their literary method. Recently, however, the Oxford Poets have shown signs of setting up separate literary establishments; their differences are developing faster than their similarities. If this tendency continues at the present rate, it is not inconceivable that in another...