V. W. B.
MUSIC
What little there is that is worth reading concerning American music is scattered through magazine articles and chapters in books upon other musical subjects. Daniel Gregory Mason has a sensible and illuminating chapter, “Music in America,” in his “Contemporary Composers.” The section, “America,” in Chapter XVI of the Stanford-Forsyth “History of Music” contrives to be tactful and at the same time just. Two books that should be read by any one interested in native composition are Cecil Forsyth’s “Music and Nationalism” and Lawrence Gilman’s “Edward MacDowell.” Rupert Hughes’s “Contemporary American Composers” is twenty years old, but still interesting; it contains sympathetic—not to say glowing—accounts of the lives and works of an incredibly large number of Americans who do and did pursue the art of musical composition. To know what an artist means when he asks to be understood read pages 240 and 241 of Cabell’s “Jurgen”—if you can get it; also the volume, “La Foire sur la Place,” of “Jean Christophe.”
D. T.
POETRY
Bodenheim, Maxwell: “Minna and Myself” (Pagan Publishing Co.); “Advice” (Alfred A. Knopf).
“H. D.”: “Sea-Garden” (Houghton Mifflin).
Eliot, T. S.: “Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf).
Fletcher, John Gould: “Irradiations: Sand and Spray” (Houghton Mifflin); “Goblins and Pagodas” (Houghton Mifflin); “The Tree of Life” (Macmillan); “Japanese Prints” (Four Seas Co.); “Breakers and Granite” (Macmillan).
Frost, Robert: “North of Boston” (Holt); “A Boy’s Will” (Holt); “Mountain Interval” (Holt).