Ernest Walsh is best remembered as the editor of This Quarter, one of the best little magazines in Paris during the mid-1920s. Although he was a poet and experimenter with language himself, it was because of his editorial policy of noninterference, his belief that writers needed to be truly innovative (not merely meeting the demands of the literary establishment), and his publication of work by excellent writers in This Quarter that he was best known. Critics then and now have had a mixed response to Walsh's own writing. Although Kay Boyle and Ethel Moorhead, with whom he edited This Quarter, perceived Walsh as a doomed genius, others, including Ernest Hemingway and Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, found him a poseur rather than a genuine poet. Whatever the merits of his poetry, the quality of his editorship of This Quarter earned him a place in literary...