Blaise Cendrars's reputation as a poet will, undoubtedly, rest upon one poem, "Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France." This is a meager residue from a body of work that fills 269 pages in the 1957 edition of the collected poems, but it is the one poem in which his basic inspiration, consisting, as it does, of autobiographical themes, fuses with his free poetic line to produce a work rich in technique and in meaning. The range of emotional coloring, the rhythms responding now to the impulsive movement of the train, now to his feeling of kinship with Jeanne and the humble creatures of this world, give it a more than personal significance. The dislocated rhythms of the modern world, that world to which he is so resolutely dedicated, are communicated in an exact and incisive language, capable of considerable beauty. It is a long poem...