Books: Poetaster

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NO TRAVELLER RETURNS—Joseph Auslander—Harper ($2.50).

Last week Joseph Auslander's chief claim to newspaper fame was his wife. Audrey Wurdemann, who had just won the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer Prize has never come his way, but Poet Auslander has been poeticizing for years, is much better known than his newcomer wife. To some readers of his verse, it may even seem that he has been writing poetry since before he was born. His facile images and garrulous lines show versifying talent often, poetic mastery never.

Poet Auslander's chief admiration is John Masefield, whom he calls "The Master Poet. . . . This High Priest of the Commonplace," but unlike Masefield he himself is a lyric, not to say a complaining, poet:

Yet do you mark how much I go alone?

And can you know how like a heavy stone

My heart is and how little I delight

In man or woman: and is this thing known?

But in nature he finds surcease from human irritations:

I know what I know—

People are not everything—

God, how the willows glow

This spring!

In lines only vaguely reminiscent of the late James Elroy Flecker he pours his scorn on effete modern poets, no better than sissies:

We who were prophets and priest-men

For the Kings of the East and the East-men,

The bugles of God to the beast-men,

His terrible seal on our brow—

Physicians of music and makers

Of language and law and the breakers

Of battle, strength-lifters, heart-shakers—

We are nice poets now.

Readers of Poet Auslander and his kind will heartily agree.