SOURCE: French, Sean. “Trade between Giants.” Times Literary Supplement (17 August 1984): 925.

In the following review, French offers a negative assessment of The Echoing Green.

Literary criticism is a collaborative process and, as F. R. Leavis argued, the crucial collaboration is that between the critic and his audience. But what if you have no confidence in any common ground with your audience at all? [In The Echoing Green], Carlos Baker seems to conduct his argument within a literary-critical version of Forster's Marabar Caves, that symbolic locale where there is no returning echo at all, simply a blank “bou-oum” representing the ultimate indifference of the universe.

The indifference of the universe is, however, a small affair when compared with the indifference of the American undergraduate in the face of the study of poetry, or so at least the elementary level of the opening chapter, “William Wordsworth,” would suggest:

For all those...