OUT TODAY

THE CRUCIFICTION OF LIBERTY, by Alexander Kerensky. John Day. $2.75.

VILLAGE TALE, by Phil Stong. Harcourt, Brace. $2.

REALITY AND ILLUSION, by Richard Rothschild. Harcourt, Brace. $3.50.

THE LEANING TOWER, by Fred Rothermell. John Day. $2.50.

CARAVAN INTO CANAAN, by Grant Taylor, Lippincott. $2.

MASKED WOMEN, by Rex Beach, Farrar & Rinehart. $2.

EZRA Pound's selection, not yet published in America, of what he deems the most vital in contemporary Angle-American poetry is likely to provoke controversy, for Pound has always been a stormy petrel in the arts, and both his criticism and his poetry possess an incisiveness that has been regarded by some as bellicose. One should not be misled by the man's egotism. Although he loses no opportunity to remind his readers of his special merits, Pound has been an important force in Anglo-American literature. His innovations have been genuine improvements in the technique of poetry; by virtue of them, he has exerted a profound influence on several contemporary poets. He has managed somehow to be in the forefront of every revolt from tradition which has not been revolting in every sense of the word.

His principles of selection are challenging: "I am confining my selection to poems Britain has not accepted an in the main that the British literary bureaucracy does not want to have printed in England." He warns T. S. Eliot against becoming associated with "a horrible and microcephalous bureaucracy which dislikes poetry, it might not be too much to say, loathes it."

Having presumably escaped the pitfalls of bureaucracy, Pound proceeds to include selections from such poets as William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Basil Bunting, T. S. Eliot and himself. These selections show the effect of a thoroughly deracinated culture upon some poets, for tradition must have stronger ties than recondite allusions to forgotten epics and obscure quotations from moth-eaten manuscripts in Continental archives. L. Z.'s notes provide some elucidation of the passages from the "XXX Cantos," but there is still not enough clarity for the plain reader. "The Red Front," by Louis Aragon, in the translation of e. e. cummings, is less eccentric than the selections from cummings' own "Eimi." T. S. Eliot is represented by the least intelligible of his poems, the first part of "Sweeny Agonistes: Fragment of an Aristophanic Melodrama."

Satire is the long suit of the more heady modern poetry, and that is the pity of it. Really brilliant puns are hidden in a mess of verbiage, without meaning to the unitiated. There are few who are prepared to undergo the rites of initiation, since there is the suspicion that the final mystery is worthless altogether and so the influence of these satirists as correctors of modern foibles is negligible.