the grouping is often conspicuously self-destructive. One feels that
"Percival and Bedivere
And Nogi side by side"
distract one from the poet's meaning as do the statesmen, artists, and sages, in The Litany of the Heroes: Amenophis Fourth—Hamlet and Keats "in one"—Moses, Confucius, Alexander, Caesar, St Paul, "Augustine," Mohammed, St Francis, Dante, Columbus, Titian, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Napoleon, Darwin, Lincoln, Emerson, Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Socrates. Like paintings in public buildings of the world's cultural and scientific progress, such groups sacrifice impact to inclusiveness. Johnny Appleseed is marred, one feels, by such phrases as "the bouncing moon," and
"He laid him down sweetly, . . .
Like a bump on a log, like a stone washed white."
We rejoice in the resilience of imagination in the idea of a grasshopper as "the Brownies' racehorse," "the fairies' Kangaroo"; and in The Golden Whales of California, there is controlled extravagance in the enumeration of "the swine with velvet ears," "the sacred raisins," "the trees which climb so high the crows are dizzy," "the snake fried in the desert," but "the biggest ocean in the world," and the whales "whooping that their souls are free," suggest the tired European's idea of America and the fantasy which visualizes St Francis in the mere literal appropriateness of an etymological pun, offends by its conception of:
"The venturesome lovers . . .
In a year and a month and a day of sailing
Leaving the whales and their whoop unfailing
On through the lightning, ice and confusion
North of the North Pole,
South of the South Pole
And west of the west of the west of the west."
Objecting further, it is impossible not to say that Mr Lindsay's
