Words that have not shape, color or hardness,
Smell or brightness, or the vivid serial ticking
Of clock or heart, attract as if to say:
Prepare for being, the first and last life.

Reading the above, where it makes sense, one is reminded
of the philosophy of a fourteen-year-old expressed in very bad
poetry. If you recall, in Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain reprinted
the composition of a Middle Western schoolgirl, in which the
very same philosophy Mr. Plutzik appears so enchanted with
was put forth in prose hardly less skillful than Mr. Plutzik's
poetry. Allowing for the age differential, what follows is pretty
good--considering that the Victorian influence was still to be
overcome. Mark Twain's schoolgirl, in a composition she
actually wrote and allowed to be used in Tom Sawyer, says:

"But after a while she finds that beneath this goodly
exterior, all is vanity; the flattery which once charmed her
soul now grates harshly upon her ear; the ballroom has lost
its charms; and with wasted health and embittered heart she
turns away with the conviction that earthly pleasures cannot
satisfy the longings of the soul!"

Now I have no desire to single out Mr. Plutzik for attack,
since I know him not at all, and the nonsense he writes is
duplicated by dozens of other "new poets," but it is most
interesting that Mr. Plutzik's book of poems is published not
by some racketeering private poetry mill, but by the large and
hard-headed firm of Harper and Brothers, and that, of this
particular poem, the New York Times critic was moved to say:

"He (Mr. Plutzik) treats some of the oldest poetic themes
with strength and clear individuality, and with a freshness
that does not depend on innovations."

I am prompted to remark that if this is freshness, then I

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