Letters from America

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JAN 1, 1988

In these short letters written mostly for the Westminster Gazette, the 26-year-old British poet jotted down his impressions of a year-long trip to the United States, Canada and the South Pacific. With an adulatory preface by Henry James, they were issued in book form in London in 1916, after Brooke's death, and have never before been published hereand with reason. The pieces consist mainly of overwritten descriptions of scenery and superficial generalities about New York and Boston, Canada's larger cities, Niagara Falls, the Canadian Prairies and Rockies, which any talented young writer might have put down to impress faraway friends. One letter, entitled "Some Niggers,'' praises the German colonizers of Samoa. Certainly not Brooke's finest writing.