The Elephants Teach is an astonishing piece of work. The subject—the story of how we got "creative writing" into our schools, colleges, and common speech—does not sound promising, but under the author’s magic wand it becomes the story of a great part of our culture since the turn of the century.

It brings before us the lives and quirks of a host of writers; the words and purport of poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Hart Crane, and others; the crabbed or expansive views of critics such as Barrett Wendell, Brander Matthews, Irving Babbitt, Cleanth Brooks, Lionel Trilling, and their kind; the battle over the meaning and utility of literature; the definition of prose and poetry and the boundary between them, if any; the intent and character of the artist, the means of supporting him, and the places of resort to that end—Bohemia, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the university; then the democratization of the passion to write, which has inspired the curious invention of schools of writing and writing "workshops": Breadloaf, Iowa, Baker’s 47, and the commercial mills.

We traverse this spacious ground after a detailed survey of the study and teaching of language and literature from the beginnings of philology early in the nineteenth century to the split of its province and the ending of its use when science made its triumphant entry into life and education. Finally, we have the spectacle of the long-lasting debate—lasting to this day—about the proper aim and way of schooling: traditional or progressive, child- or contents-centered, with teachers teaching or only "facilitating." This last scene contains the makings of high comedy beyond any afforded by the earlier topics.

In short, we have here a panorama—a pageant, rather—of the American will-to-art. Everybody who has contributed to that venture or commented on it can be seen in his place, holding his bit of ground, and with his mouth open: from William Dean Howells to Saul Bellow, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to John Berryman, from William Lyon Phelps to Van Wyck Brooks, from the cantankerous Ezra Pound and the learned, sober Louise, from Alfred Noyes to Robert Lowell, from Charles W. Eliot to Henry Seidel Canby, from John Dewey to Hughes Mearns, from Ambrose Bierce to Jean Stafford, and so on in multiplied pairings. Offhand I cannot think of anybody who would be missing at a complete roll call based on Who’s Who.

There is no partisanship in this recital, neither for the avant-garde of any date nor for the middle ranks and the stragglers. But the story is no mere listing and quoting and pretending to remain "judgment-free." Individual justice is meted out temperately in pleasant, readable prose. Needless to say, the research was extensive and has gone deep; there are even graphs and statistics where they can throw light. Nor is the abundance of matter diffuse. All the topics, all the names and notions form a coherent pattern. One is left with a new sense of what lies hidden in the word creative.