Abstract

As If a Skeleton Were Singing

The article presents an overview of the book "Circumference. Varieties of Metaphysical Verse, 1456-1928," edited with a Preface by Genevieve Taggard. Miss Taggard has her own special moral, which is, finally, that "for the metaphysical poet Science is the freedom of the universe, liberating a vast unused mentality; the excitement of enormous sweeps, the dizziness of looking in all directions at the surrounding fact." Her collection of poems, from William Dunbar to T. S. Eliot and many another modern, is of course a rich one. Among the American contemporaries of Miss Taggard the note seems to be struck best by Léonie Adams, Louise Bogan, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Phelps Putnam, Allen Tate, and Wallace Stevens.