SOURCE: "Truth and the Academic Style," in Poetry (Chicago), Vol. XLIX, No. I, October, 1936, pp. 49-51.

In the following review of St. Peter Relates an Incident, Rosenberg observes that Johnson's conservative poetic temperament undercuts the harsh political realities of his subject matter.

The title poem [of Saint Peter Relates an Incident, Selected Poems] is the author's expression in satirical terms, of the indignation he felt on reading in the newspaper of a morning in 1930 that the U. S. government was sending a group of gold-star mothers to France to visit the graves of their sons slain in the World War, and that the Negro gold-star mothers would not be allowed to travel with the white, but would be sent over later on a second-class ship. The incident, related in Eternity by Saint Peter, deals with the discovery on Resurrection Day that the Unknown Soldier, buried in Washington, happens...