Poems and Sketches of E. B. White By E. B. White
Harper & Row, 217 pp., $13.50 For a half-century or so, E. B. White has been turning out a slow but steady stream of essays, poems, prose sketches (or “casuals,” as The New Yorker calls them) and books for children, all written in a subtly idiosyncratic style which was the despair of his imitators as far back as the early Thirties: informal in tone, precise in effect, and as fresh and unaffected as Fred Astaire singing an Irving Berlin tune. The stream has been more or less dried up for some time now—White’s last “new” collection, The Points of My Compass, appeared in 1962—but, as if to compensate, Harper & Row has been putting together a uniform edition of sorts, starting, six years ago, with a volume of selected letters. Essays of E. B. White was brought out the following year; and now we have a generous helping of White’s lighter prose and verse, called Poems and Sketches of E. B. White.
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