The translation is by Constance Garnett and is excellently done. Mrs. Garnett, more than any linguist, has in her work conveyed the atmosphere and idiom and temperament of the Russian into English. She is responsible for the remarkable translations of Turgeniev which have carried his art unchanged into another tongue, as well as for the Dostoevsky novels. For the benefit of readers who will be puzzled by her footnote on page 11, the “Green Street” which she is unable to define is the avenue formed between two ranks of prison soldiers through which the condemned convict is wheeled and beaten. The soldiers stand armed with fresh, green sticks which flash brightly in the sun as they swish down on the naked back—hence the jocular name. [1] _The Macmillan Company, New York._ Notes For a Review of “The Spoon River Anthology” CARL SANDBURG _The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. (The Macmillan Company, New York)_ I saw Masters write this book. He wrote it in snatched moments between fighting injunctions against a waitresses’ union striving for the right to picket and gain one day’s rest a week, battling from court to court for compensation to a railroad engineer rendered a loathsome cripple by the defective machinery of a locomotive, having his life amid affairs as intense as those he writes of. At The Book and Play Club one night Masters tried to tell how he came to write the Anthology. Of course, he couldn’t tell. There are no writers of great books able to tell the how and why of a dominating spirit that seizes them and wrenches the flashing pages from them. But there are a few forces known that play a part. And among these Masters said he wanted emphasis placed on _Poetry_, voices calling “Unhand me,” verses and lines from all manner and schools of writers welcomed in Harriet Monroe’s magazine. Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own heart-beats in it. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from. Such a writer and book are realized here. Masters’ home town is Lewiston, Illinois, on the banks of the Spoon River. There actually is such a river where Masters waded bare-foot as a boy, and where the dead and the living folk of his book have fished or swam, or thrown pebbles and watched the widening circles. It is not far, less than a few hours’ drive, from where Abraham Lincoln was raised. People who knew Lincoln are living there today. Well, some two hundred and twenty portraits in free verse have been etched by Masters from this valley. They are Illinois people. Also they are the people of anywhere and everywhere in so-called civilization.