[Spiller was an American educator, editor, and critic whose works included Four Makers of the American Mind: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville (1976). In the review below, he provides a mixed assessment of Achievement in American Poetry.]

This brief survey of twentieth-century poetry in America [Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950] is one of six books which together attempt to review and evaluate American literature by types during the first half of the century. This book differs from some of the others in that Miss Bogan is herself a poet and critic of note rather than an academic scholar, and her book is a personal essay rather than a work of historical objectivity. It also differs in that the author devotes a substantial number of her few pages to French, Irish, Spanish, and British poets who have been influential in America at a sacrifice of careful analysis of the work of poets who have been native and resident in this country. The result is an essay on modern poetry rather than on American poetry, in which Rilke receives almost as much attention as Frost, Auden rather more than either of them, and the team of Pound and Eliot approximately as much as all other individual American poets put together. The book therefore cannot be taken seriously as a history of twentieth-century American poetry.

It can, however, be taken seriously as an essay written to a well-defined and rather generally accepted thesis: that T. S. Eliot discovered an aesthetic which successfully resolved the confusions of modern industrial man and made his experience once more available to poetic insight. Pound, according to this view, prepared the way for the master by his ubiquitous experimentation and protest; and Wallace Stevens, W. C. Williams, and Marianne Moore learned enough of the new way to write distinguished if not great poetry. Other poets like Frost, Sandburg, Hart Crane, and younger poets like Karl Shapiro are measured according to their relative distances from the central light. In Eliot, the new freedoms become the new discipline of interpretation. His own achievement in The Waste Land and Four Quartets adequately meets the requirements of his critical theory and provides fixed poles of reference for all lines of poetic development in the period.

This statement is something of an oversimplification of what is itself a vast oversimplification of the facts. But it is the essential gospel of an increasingly articulate group of contemporary poets and critics of poetry. In attempting to give it historical validity, Miss Bogan has indulged in many pages of generalizations about cultural facts and movements and parallel developments in other arts and in the arts of other countries. Most of these have at least some of their roots in facts, but they are offered so generously that they can be defended neither logically nor chronologically. Her method can be accepted only if her book is taken as a provocative essay by a sensitive and exciting imagination. Keen insights, stimulated rather than supported by wide and eclectic reading, have produced a book which should open its subject up to further study and perhaps to sounder historical analysis.