FRESHMAN NUMBER OF ADVOCATE IS REVIEWED BY C. C. ABBOTT '28

Of late years, with the multiplication of student activities, with the development of students as "news" of public interest and the advent of the linotype, the position of collegiate literary periodicals in the undergraduate world has gradually changed. Far older than the humorous publications and daily news sheets and athletic journals.

Indeed college literary publications are progenitors of them all--magazines such as "The Harvard Advocate", the Yale and Princeton "Lits", The Williams "News" have bit by bit turned over many of their former functions to their younger compeers. No longer are they shot gun prescriptions for the undergraduate palate, mingling university bulletins, college news, bits of spice, athletic reviews and literary efforts. In an age of differentiation and and specialization it is no doubt better so. However, as these subsidiary activities have been placed in other hands, the literary monthly has been left with more ample opportunity and attention less distracted to perform functions more important and fundamental, to publish the best of undergraduate writing, to allow the newest generation of authors to try its wings in print, to provide a healthy vent for the ideas and abilities of these aspiring writes, and to subject them and their efforts to a healthy criticism.

Garrison Prize Poems

Annually the undergraduates of a college produce a number of semi-official documents that should be given public notice, permanent record. Prize poems and essays, Student Council Reports, Class Poems. Commencement Parts and Orations, recommendations of the student body--year by year they come, forming a long series, a record of undergraduate thought and taste and ability. The current number of the Advocate, running The Garrison Prize Poems, shows an appreciation not only of the excellence of the poetry, but of its responsibility to present to its readers the finest flowering of current undergraduate writings. Mr. Conrad's poems are good, very good, and give a more than adequate answer to such sceptics as hold that Harvard's education of criticism and classicism will quell the romantic ability of even an undergraduate. Of the four poems, Ex Libris shows, perhaps, the best technique, the nicest imagery, but discrimination is difficult. It is to be hoped that the Advocate will later run the Bowdoin Prize Essays if they approach the excellence of Mr. Conrad's work.

Alsop's Essay

With the essay of Mr. Alsop on Lawrence, Lewis, Eliot and Joyce, and the stories of Mr. Donaldson and Mr. Sulzberger, the Advocate plays admirably its part of affording the man interested in writing a chance to write, and the man interested in seeing what a Harvard undergraduate can write a chance to see. Mr. Alsop's critique bespeaks ability and care; it is readable and well-done. Whether one entirely agrees with his conclusions is in a sense unimportant. He has been, obviously, much influenced by the same forces which he believes led his subjects to their querulous, rebellious, dissenting position in life and literature, the forces--commonly associated with the Industrial Revolution--of standardization and mechanization, and the depressing mediocrity of the mob. The world, especially the modern world, is a little too much with him, and it is with the men of whom he writes. One suspects his writing, somehow, of a past full of many themes and reports, where an anxious solemnity has routed levity. Nevertheless, the critique is acute and readable. The stories in the issue show a lighter touch, if less care. Structurally, they are not stories at all, but rather anecdotes, character studies, Mr. Donaldson's "A Form of Shyness" is particularly well-done. He finds himself at home with his characters, and they live--almost too well. Mr. Sulzberger's "Lena" is not on the same level. It is to be regretted that there is not more in the number in the way of book reviews and musical and dramatic criticism, but all in all, the Advocate opens its sixty-third--or is it its sixty-fourth -- consecutive year in sound and creditable fashion, a review rather than a journal.