Surrealism can be fun; it can shake us out of grooves of convention. But it cannot go ahead—or lift up, either: what momentary exultations it achieves are fast and forgettable, the effects of a jag. The "new myth" does not come.

Nevertheless, [it is apparent in To Walk a Crooked Mile that] Thomas McGrath, a likable and ingenious young poet very largely under the sway of two established "myths"—the Whitman-democratic and the Marxist-revolutionary—has allowed himself to be lured into the camp of the surrealists, apparently by his reading of the current English school of poetry—the same group aptly characterized by W. Y. Tindall as having "achieved a confusion of Marx with Freud." The chances are that this is only a passing allegiance. While it lasts, however, McGrath rattles off such stanzas as this:

    Remember the blind harp tethered in the bathroom?
    Or earlier the...