Books: Humane History

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN POETRY, 1900—1940 (524 pp.)—Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska—Harcourf, Brace ($4).

Poetry's modern apologists have cried up modern poetry as such a dark art that many an intelligent reader has given it up as sense-making literature, written by human beings for human beings. In this book, Poets Gregory and Zaturenska (Mrs. Gregory) do a good deal to bring the 20th Century Pegasus back to earth. They contend that U.S. poetry in this century, gaming "in the virility and'brilliance of its speech," has become the best in the English-speaking world.

In 1900...