A Stanley Burnshaw Reader provides a valuable overview of one of the most unusual—and longest: spanning seven decades—literary careers of our time. In the course of that career, Stanley Burnshaw has written a verse play (The Bridge, 1945), a landmark work of poetic theory (The Seamless Web, 1970), two novels (The Sunless Sea, 1948, and The Refusers: An Epic of the Jews, 1981), a biography (Robert Frost Himself, 1986), and several volumes of poetry. He has also edited two pioneering anthologies of poems in translation: The Poem Itself (1960), in which he attempts to demonstrate that an intimacy with poems written in French, German, and other languages may be achieved through a “simultaneous” reading of the originals and their literal renderings; and The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself (1965), organized on the same principle. Almost every facet of Mr. Burnshaw’s diverse career is represented in this new Reader. The book also contains a checklist of Mr. Burnshaw’s writings and an intelligent, if contentious, introduction by Denis Donoghue.

Mr. Burnshaw’s career is unusual in two respects. First, it has taken place almost entirely outside of the academy. For years he worked at Henry Holt, then one of the premier publishing houses in New York. It was there that he was Robert Frost’s editor. Second, Mr. Burnshaw underwent a momentous shift in political and intellectual perspective in the course of his career. In the Thirties, he was closely aligned with The New