THE SHREVEPORT TIMES

Shreveport, Louisiana, U.S.A.

1 July 1956

(page 54)

Poe-esque Atmosphere

In T. Williams’ Poems.

In the Winter of Cities, by Tennessee Williams, (New Directions, New York, 117 pp., $3.50.)

The world of Tennessee Williams is a fragile, morbid, haunted place, curiously beautiful, where web and gauze, dark bells and velvety moths are the props for a drama of death, insanity and degeneration.

Williams is not so good a poet as he is a dramatist, or even writer of fiction, but his extraordinary sensibility is sufficient to make the poems effective.

There is a Poe-esque atmosphere—or perhaps it is nearer to the nameless horrors described by an H. P. Lovecraft, with a touch of the baroque imagination of a Vernon Lee. Also, in some of the poems, one finds a resemblance to the style and thinking of the black magician, Aleister Crowley.

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