Theodore & Renée Weiss, editors Quarterly Review of Literature 50th Anniversary Anthology.
Quarterly Review of Literature (26 Haslet Avenue, Princeton, N.J. 08540), 561 pages, $35; $20 paper
In this age of fly-by-night journals edited by those with fly-by-night taste, it is a pleasure to reflect on the happy history of the Quarterly Review of Literature. Founded over half a century ago by Theodore and Renée Weiss, the QRL, as it is called by its small but avid readership, has one of the most distinguished rosters of past contributors around. Modernist giants such as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams—all of whom are represented in this new anniversary anthology—published poems in the pages of the QRL, as did notable voices of later generations such as Elizabeth Bishop, Vernon Watkins, Richard Wilbur, Jean Garrigue, David Schubert, Louis Simpson, and Charles Tomlinson—all of whom also have poems here. (Garrigue’s “Studies for an Actress” alone is worth the price of the book.)
For many years the QRL was a forum for fiction, too, but because the editors felt that poetry had been abandoned by the commercial presses, the decision was made in 1978 to publish only quarterly anthologies of poetry or annual volumes comprising four or more full-length books chosen in open competition. The new anthology is in two sections, “New Poems by QRL’s Poetry Book Winners” and “Poetry from QRL’s Past.” Of course the Weisses’ decision to place the work of a