SOURCE: A review of Saltwater Farm, in Poetry, Vol. LI, No. V, February, 1938, pp. 267-70.

In the following excerpt, Millspaugh reviews Saltwater Farm and finds nothing to recommend it

That rare person, the serious reader of poetry, may legitimately expect of experienced writers at least a minimum of care in craft, a fairly well-developed point of view from which to inspect society and the men who compose it, a character sufficiently mature to be free of such vulgarities as smugness, self-complacency, and sentimentality, and an imagination disciplined by tradition, compelled by the predicaments of contemporary life, projected by good will and wonder into the astonishing future. Measured against these none too austere standards, the present books of Robert Hillyer and Robert P. Tristram Coffin fail.

Though Mr. Hillyer is of the two the more cultivated and the more accomplished craftsman, neither of these poets achieves a level much...