SOURCE: “Belle Dame sans Merci,” in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. VII, No. 47, June 13, 1931, p. 891.

Canby believes that the techniques Parker uses in Death and Taxes produce “poetry deserving high praise.”

The times are choked and cluttered with disillusion—a sticky disillusion, an adolescent petulance, solemn and unreasonable, that pours itself out in dull, formless novels dealing with ugly people who should have been stepped upon at birth, if indeed they were really as mudgy and disagreeable as the writers make them out—which is most improbable. We are blared at and saxophoned by a tinny sophistication that means nothing, and is nothing but the restlessness of smart people who think they are not appreciated, or the shallow bawdry of children educated beyond their characters. Cynicism leaves the sincerity of a tub for the suspicious publicity of a night club, and a “hard” generation patronizes in the...