As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert   World Within World by Stephen Spender. Modern Library, 398 pages. $23.95. Stephen Spender’s World Within World is as much a reconsideration, a critique, of the art of autobiography as it is an autobiography. Just as Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldieris today read as an Ars Prosa, World Within World petitions its [...]

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert The Beat Hotel by Barry Miles. Grove Press. 294 pages. $24.95. The byronic images and locales of La Boheme, Giacomo Puccini’s nineteenth-century depiction of classically starving artists in Paris’s Latin Quarter, have come to dominate, rather predictably, portrayals of young artists, writers, and singers: whiskered rogues in whose unwashed ears the [...]

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert Collected Poems by James Merrill. Knopf, 2001. Tribute to James Merrill, April 10, 2001, sponsored by The New School Writing Program & the Academy of American Poets. Standings of poets and their poems are susceptible to the same caprices and reweighings that threaten (or grace) all historical subjects, but theirs [...]