New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1928, The Legend of Quincibald. From the introduction:

To anticipate criticism has generally been considered poor judgment on the part of a writer, and may be so in this instance. To the reader who is by nature hostile to the methods I have chosen, I have nothing to say whether of praise or blame. He has his limitation as I have mine. But to the reader who has some disposition to discover in these verses certain aspects of his own mystery, I should like to say a word.

This poem is an attempt to deal with the stuff of personality in the only way in which that stuff can be dealt with — that is to say, symbolically. The persons and things which have a place in the poem, have that place because no simpler expression will perform their function. I wish it could, but for the present at least such simplicity is impossible. A reader who surrenders himself to the succession and flow of the images, will, I think, find a meaning in the poem, and that no light one. A reader who endeavors to torture the symbolism into allegory, and the allegory into what he would call plain English, will find what I never meant, and what in point of fact means nothing. If he desires to do this I cannot stop him, and indeed have failed as far as he is concerned. But I hope with all my heart that there will be readers who, by experience painful or otherwise, have learned that at times fantasy is more practical than logic, and that a mechanical sorites can be the most deadly enemy of truth. Such persons will I hope find in this poem an order of things congenial to their imagination within and to their contact with the world without. They may not be better than others, but they are a great deal luckier.