SOURCE: A review of Working Papers: Selected Essays and Reviews, in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2, Summer, 1983, pp. 330-31.

Porter is an American novelist, educator, and critic. In the following mixed review of Working Papers, he faults some of Carruth's essays as "glib and naive," but lauds the author's ability to write about poetry "with modesty, intelligence, and generosity."

Hayden Carruth's Working Papers provides a poet's-eye view of the literary and intellectual scene of the last thirty years, in his selected essays and reviews with an introduction by Judith Weissman. The forty-four works have been gathered from literary quarterlies such as Hudson Review, the monthly Poetry (which Carruth edited 1949–50), weeklies such as Saturday Review and The Nation, and from the Chicago Daily News. The reviews treat an assortment of philosophers, critics, and historians including Northrop Frye, Edmund Wilson, Eliseo Vivas, Eliot, Camus, and Sartre, and a larger group...