SOURCE: Gleckner, Robert. Review of The Echoing Green: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Phenomena of Transference in Poetry, by Carlos Baker. American Literature 57, no. 1 (March 1985): 158-59.

In the following essay, Gleckner finds The Echoing Green limp and disappointing.

Jacket copy, publishers believe, helps to sell books. Perhaps it will sell some copies of this book [The Echoing Green], but those who buy on this account will learn to their disappointment, especially if they know Carlos Baker's previous work, that you can't always tell a book from its jacket blurb. This jacket tells us that Baker “examines and interprets” the works of Yeats, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and Auden “against the background of English Romantic poetry,” but the “examination” and “interpretation” reveals little about those works beyond reasonably informed common knowledge. And “the background of English romantic poetry” is but a routine five-chapter summary of the careers, critical ideas, and...