Surrealism can be fun; it can shake us out of grooves of convention. But it cannot go ahead—or lift up, either: what momentary exultations it achieves are fast and forgettable, the effects of a jag. The "new myth" does not come.

Nevertheless, [it is apparent in To Walk a Crooked Mile that] Thomas McGrath, a likable and ingenious young poet very largely under the sway of two established "myths"—the Whitman-democratic and the Marxist-revolutionary—has allowed himself to be lured into the camp of the surrealists, apparently by his reading of the current English school of poetry—the same group aptly characterized by W. Y. Tindall as having "achieved a confusion of Marx with Freud." The chances are that this is only a passing allegiance. While it lasts, however, McGrath rattles off such stanzas as this:

    Remember the blind harp tethered in the bathroom?
    Or earlier the surrealist station where,
    Fenced with false faces, and brushing off the eyes
    Which stuck to our naked suits we dined upon the air.

This is rather good, of its sort; but what can one say for something like this?

    Maine is a map of Freud with feminine fine lakes
    And phallic forests wherever the blind eye looks.
    Here the last century exists on rubber crutches,
    And the hours and the enigmas multiply in hutches.

It is really painful to see a poet of real talent occupying himself with these three-finger exercises, which any reasonably fair student can turn out. McGrath has a "line" of his own, based on genuine Western folk-speech …; he hardly needs to lean on such worn props as Dali's crutches. When he wants to, he can find the right words for love, or command anger and revulsion, irony and wit. (pp. 51-2)

In so far as he directs his poetry toward political action, McGrath simplifies too much (as when he exalts the pure love of vagrants above the corrupt love of the rich) and loses his grip as an artist, permitting banalities of diction ("comradeship," "brotherhood," "bourgeois," "upper class," and the like)….

But there is a great deal of life in this poetry, for which one can forgive the lapses into crutches or class-war. (p. 52)