SOURCE: "A Neo-Romantic Poet," in The Nation, Vol. 133, No. 3465, December 2, 1931, pp. 616-17.

In the following review, Josephson summarizes Cendrars's work as lacking the long-term appeal of great poetry.

John Dos Passos has made a felicitous translation of a group of poems by Blaise Cendrars, at least one of which, the long Prosody of the Transsiberian, has been a famous example of modern poetry for almost a generation. Dos Passos has much in common with Cendrars; he has the same vibrant revolutionary spirit, the same overwhelming interest in the actual world with all its characteristic sores, the same love of travel, the same effect of speed in writing combined with indifference to musical perfection. Nevertheless, the appearance of Cendrars's poems in English tempts one to reconsider the whole twentieth-century school of poets with which the versatile Swiss Parisian is identified.

Cendrars is one of a number of writers and...