Although most of White's poetry is light verse, his best poems are not always his humorous poems, and his humorous ones often have an ironic twist or comment that gives them a serious tone. Those poems where humor is the chief or sole effect are apt to be too topical or too insubstantial to be effective; some, however, are successful. (p. 38)

By and large, we cannot claim a great deal for the poems in [The Lady Is Cold]; White is too restrained, and at times there is too much distance between the poet and the scene he describes; in most of these poems, he comments quietly on the daily routine of city life, its minor conflicts, its tensions. He describes late evening and early morning rambles, the chance appearance of a pretty face, and the brief contact with people that brings a transient sense of unity; taking a half-whimsical look at himself, he celebrates his minor victories, and is amused by his weaknesses.

A modest quality, as well as restraint, exists in many of these poems, almost as if White were afraid of being too serious, too involved—or perhaps too conscious of the danger of destroying his sensitive perception of life by putting it into words…. (pp. 39-40)

White experimented with a wide variety of poetic forms in The Lady Is Cold, but a kind of caution also appears; he is ultimately conventional. (p. 40)

One difference between the poems in [The Fox of Peapack] and those in the earlier one is that many in this begin with a newspaper comment and develop from it. This approach may tend to produce limited and topical poems but it also suggests that White was moving closer to his material. The Fox of Peapack has fewer lyrical poems, fewer bits of whimsy; it has, on the other hand, stronger and more vigorous statements. (p. 41)

White's poetry cannot be seen aside from White. If his real significance lies in his point of view,… then the ultimate significance of his poetry lies in how it helps to define what he represents. Since his prose defines that position far better than his poetry, his poetry must take a secondary role in any final assessment. (pp. 47-8)

White has been the great spokesman for what might be considered a mid-form, but a mid-form of ideas, of human warmth—the viewing of life not with cosmic seriousness but with tolerant affection. White speaks for this mid-form, not the mid-form of poetry. (p. 48)

[Almost] everything White wrote from 1927 to 1938 had some connection with The New Yorker and showed the spirit and attitude that he brought with him to the magazine, or developed while he was working for it. (p. 49)

[It] was Is Sex Necessary?, not [The New Yorker's] "Notes and Comment," that first made White's name well-known…. The book was very much a part of the 1920's, and very much a part of White's early New Yorker days. In fact, we might say that the book, light-hearted spoof that it is, represents the maturity of White's first period of intellectual growth—if that is not too pretentious a way of talking about him. It is a humorous book, yet beneath its humor it makes a serious point, more serious than almost anything that White had said in The New Yorker up to that time. (pp. 50-1)

White, then, began as a poet and as a humorist, and it was as a humorist that he first attracted much attention. Although he never lost his humorous touch, a retrospective view of White suggests that humor is not his enduring quality. Serious themes emerge, and humor becomes more and more a means to an end, not an end in itself. (p. 53)

White was well on his way to becoming the spokesman for a literate, cultured minority. He could see the seriousness of the Depression; the follies and pretensions of politicians, ministers, and scientists; the growing threat to civilization posed by an impending second world war—he could see these things, and yet not lose his sense of humor, and not be drawn into a dogmatic or doctrinaire position. (p. 63)

The reader coming from Quo Vadimus? and Every Day Is Saturday to One Man's Meat is struck by White's greater sureness of material and expression, by his clearer thinking on many topics, and above all by his more penetrating moral purpose and his deeper conviction in attitudes and feelings. (p. 67)

Two topics run through many of the essays: often stated, often implied, they exist as a unifying pattern for One Man's Meat. One concerns war and internationalism, and the other domestic social and political problems. (p. 68)

The best essay in One Man's Meat, "Once More to the Lake," combines in rare form White's stylistic economy, which is essentially the stuff of poetry, with his skillful use of details, his gift for the evocation of the past and his feeling of the circularity of time; and, finally, his haunting awareness of the transient quality of life, the imminence of death. (p. 74)

We find in this essay much of the credo of E. B. White. Here is his simple love of nature; his nostalgia for the past, and along with that his inclination (never quite given in to) to reject the present (the tarred road, the outboard motors) in favor of the past; his preference for doing rather than thinking (the walking, the fishing, the boating); his feeling for the mystery outside the church, not inside it ("this holy spot," "cathedral stillness"); his vivid language, with his liking for the simple, natural figures of speech ("the boat would leap ahead, charging bullfashion at the dock"); his love for people, for his son, and his sense of identity with the young (which made him such a good writer, later on, of children's stories); and the everpresent sense of death that with White was sometimes whimsical [and sometimes intensely serious]. (p. 76)

Written over a period of three years, the editorials in The Wild Flag are White's only book-length discussion of a single topic. They form some of his best writing; because of the subject, however, they must be judged on somewhat different grounds from that of his other work—and judging them today is not easy. If the book seems naïve, the reader must remember the context—World War II—and the often naïve hopes many people had for world peace. If it is repetitious, he must remember that originally the editorials appeared at uneven intervals over an extended period of time. (p. 90)

Perhaps more serious than White's lack of historical perspective is the absence of any reference to the psychological and sociological aspects of war. (p. 91)

In "Across the Street and into the Grill," one of his best spoofs, White parodies Hemingway's novel Across the River and into the Trees. White chose his subject well; the novel, probably Hemingway's worst, deserves parody. White, I am sure, would grant that Hemingway's style at its best is beyond parody, but in a style like Hemingway's there is a thin dividing line between effectiveness and affectation—like the thin line between sentiment and sentimentality in much of Charles Dickens.

One of the functions of the parodist is to discover these fine lines and, by crossing them, to show the dangers and vulnerability of the style. With devastating skill White does precisely this, concentrating on chapters XI and XII of Hemingway's novel. His technique is to select certain words and phrases Hemingway used; placing them in a slightly different context, he pinpoints the foolishness of the original. (p. 124)

[It] is not in the specific word echoes that the greatest success of "Across the Street and into the Grill" lies, but rather in White's dead-pan parody of the fatuous, trivial tone of the whole scene in the novel. It is the posed and phony heroism, the pseudo-realistic, irrelevant details that White singles out for ridicule. (p. 125)

The essays in The Points of My Compass fall into what are now familiar patterns for White: national and international affairs, the idea of progress, the urban and rural scenes and, in two notable essays, the circularity of time—a theme in much of White's writing and one present by implication in a number of these last essays. In fact, the whole collection, ending as it does with an autobiographical essay that goes back to White's days in Seattle and Alaska, suggests the idea of circularity. Also, to many of these essays White has written postscripts containing "after-thoughts and later information." They add to the feeling of circularity.

We find also a curious sort of geographical circularity in the collection…. This "geographical distortion," as he calls it, seems to broaden the dimensions of the work; but it also underlines the importance of New York City to White. It was for him a microcosm, a center, and the four corners of the world could almost be contained within its emotional if not geographical limits. Geography was to White something of an emotional matter…. Without being pompous about it, we could say that the essays represent the culmination of White's experience, the farthest point of navigation—not quite to the heart of darkness, perhaps, but certainly to the heart of his message to his readers. (p. 132)

All of his reports of the past may not be in yet, all the points of his compass not yet revealed, but I suspect that his major themes have been stated; The Points of My Compass, in its subject and structure, is a fitting and impressive summation. In space, it is a microcosm of his world; in time, a symbol of the unity and coherence of human experience, where youth and age, city and country, past and present, come together. The book is ultimately White's plea for a vital life where the means do not become ends, where gadgets do not create more problems than they solve, where the "advances" of science do not destroy all possibility of real advance because they have destroyed life itself. (p. 148)

White's style … developed freely as an expression of himself and of all those forces, impossible ever to understand fully, that make a man a writer….

If it is not easy to account for White's style, it is also not easy to describe it, though that must be my concern now. Certainly one key to its perfection is his choice of words. (p. 155)

Unlike some writers, White has few words or expressions that he keeps using. It is remarkable, for example, that for over a twenty-year period, while he was writing substantial parts of "Notes and Comment," there were only two or three instances when he opened a comment with the same word or phrase. And even those expressions or words of which he appears to be fond are used so rarely as to be scarcely noticed.

What is striking about White's use of words is not so much the individual choice but the context in which the choice appears—his brilliant use of contrast, his use of the specific word to make a generalization or an abstraction clear, his figures of speech drawn from clear observation of nature or daily life. (pp. 155-56)

[Over] the long stretch of White's work, the combination of seriousness and whimsy, or of the minute and the momentous, is effective, and at times profoundly true. Because human experience itself is a curious mixture of shifting tones and moods there is a basic honesty and wisdom in White's writing; he reveals himself as a man unafraid of surface contradictions or of simple and natural responses. (p. 158)

[It] must be admitted at the outset that White has not written great poems, great novels, great plays, or great short stories. As these are the genres most talked about and admired by today's critics, we might wonder what there was left for White to be. (p. 160)

Few admirers of E. B. White, however, would be content to let his significance rest on his connection with The New Yorker; or on his worth as a stylist; or as a writer of sketches, short stories, or children's books. He is equally important as the spokesman of our times for the right of privacy, a right threatened by the population explosion, by devices for snooping, and by repressive measures instituted through the fear of violence in our society….

White is, in E. M. Forster's sense of the word, an aristocrat—one of the aristocracy of "the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky"—and he speaks for those like himself. (p. 163)

White speaks for those who have taken, like himself, the often lonely role of the true individualist. He gives strength to those who find the role difficult, who find it hard to resist putting on a badge or acquiring a label, but who do resist. Surely such a spokesman has a significant part to play in a society in which pressures to conform are great and in which even non-conformity turns upon itself and produces often the ultimate conformist. Although White may sometimes hold a middle position, his role is not that of the defender of compromise. But, unlike the professional liberal, or the professional conservative, he doesn't scorn the middle position; and, when he sees cause, he is not afraid to abandon whatever position he has taken. He embodies tolerance without condescension, understanding without oversimplification, individualism without eccentricity. (p. 164)

Edward C. Sampson, in his E. B. White (copyright 1974 by Twayne Publishers, Inc.; reprinted with the permission of Twayne Publishers, A Division of G. K. Hall & Co., Boston), Twayne, 1974.