The article analyzes articles about poetry published in several periodicals. In "Hawthorne's Smile," by Vern Wagner, published in the "Texas Quarterly," he presents Nathaniel Hawthorne as a Black humorist. John C. Cairns' "Some Recent Historians and the "Strange Defeat" of 1940," published in the "Journal of Modern History," suggests that historians who have dealt with the fall of France have been too quick to judge, too slow to examine relevant documents and too lacking in sympathetic historical imagination.