Word: spearheaded
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...SPEARHEAD (604 pp.) - Edited by James Laughlin-New Directions...
...Publisher Laughlin has pieced and pasted together a decade's representative pieces from his experimenters. Among Spearhead's contributors: E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams-both now established off-center poets; Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, dithyrambling Henry Miller, William Saroyan, High Priestess Gertrude Stein, plus a host of others known only in isolated literary circles...
...Compromise. What accomplishment can these experimentalists show? Spearhead writers are generally distinguished by devotion to what they consider standards of great art. In love with words, scorning the cheap and obvious, aiming for goals that often seem peculiar and are always unpopular, they have resigned themselves to a precarious existence on the outskirts of the U.S. literary world...
Some have created work that may have more lasting value than some of their more successful contemporaries': John Wheelwright's granite-honest poems of moral and spiritual struggle; William Carlos Williams' angular free verse written between his rounds as a New Jersey physician. For most of Spearhead's contributors, however, experimentalism has become an end in itself, a sort of perpetual and meaningless joy ride...
Predictable Ruts. Significantly, the best of Spearhead's younger writers are turning away from technical experiments. In John Berryman's fine story, The Imaginary Jew, in Delmore Schwartz's poetic probing of the Oedipus complex ("the child must carry his fathers on his back"), and in Randall Jarrell's savage war poetry, verbal high jinks are replaced by untortured statement and controlled emotion...