Tom Kristensen occupies a place as a leading avant-garde poet and novelist in the interwar years in Danish literature. His poetry ranges from flamboyant early poems achieving their effect through sound, color, and fantastic imagery to later works that are more subdued but still inventive; his novels range from clear derivatives of realism to one of the most important Danish novels of the twentieth century, Hærværk (1930; translated as Havoc, 1968), with its Joycean exploration of the psyche of a single man. In his prose and poetry Kristensen shows a command of language and must be regarded as one of the great renewers of Danish as a literary medium. He was also a highly respected essayist and for years a principal reviewer for the newspaper Politiken, using his authority to try to establish the principle that the reviewer's task was to judge the end result in...