DOCSLIB.ORG

Who Killed Poetry?

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Who Killed Poetry? Commentary Who Killed Poetry? Joseph Epstein There are certain things in which mediocrity the best of their work was already behind them. is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public The audience for poetry was then less than vast; eloquence. it had diminished greatly since the age of -LA BRUYRE Browning and Tennyson. In part this was owing to the increased difficulty of poetry, of which AM NOT about to say of poetry, as T. S. Eliot, in 1921, had remarked: "It appears Marianne Moore once did, that "I, too, likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists, dislike it," for not only has reading poetry brought at present, must be difficult." Eliot's justification me instruction and delight but I was taught to for this difficulty-and it has never seemed quite exalt it. Or, more precisely, I was taught that persuasive-is that poetry must be as complex as poetry was itself an exalted thing. No literary the civilization it describes, with the modem poet genre was closer to the divine than poetry; in no becoming "more comprehensive, more allusive, other craft could a writer soar as he could in a more indirect." All this served to make the modern poem. When a novelist or a dramatist wrote with poet more exclusive as well, which, for those of the flame of the highest inspiration, his work was us who adored (a word chosen with care) modern said to be "touched by poetry"-as in the phrase poetry, was quite all right. Modern poetry, with "touched by God." "The right reader of a good the advance of modernism, had become an art for poem," said Robert Frost, "can tell the moment the happy few, and the happy few, it must be said, it strikes him that he has taken an immortal are rarely happier than when they are even fewer. wound-that he will never get over it." Such But such snobbish considerations aside, the quasi-religious language to describe poetry was generations of poets between W. B. Yeats (1865- not unusual; not so long ago, it was fairly com- 1939) and W. H. Auden (1907-1973) produced an mon. "The function of poetry," wrote Robert impressive body of poetry-of the kind that, in Graves, "is religious invocation of the Muse; its Frost's phrase, really does make "an immortal use is the experience of mixed exaltation and wound"; once read, it never is quite forgotten. Nor horror that her presence excites." were all of these poets imposingly difficult: Yeats Both these quotations and several others in the isn't, nor is Robert Frost. The most difficult same spirit are to be found at the back of Oscar poems of all, the Cantos of Ezra Pound, seem over Williams's A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry the years to have slipped outside the canon of great (revised edition), a small stout volume that has modem poetry and to be thought instead the something of the look and heft of a missal or other interesting fragments of a great cultural impre- religious tome. Even Delmore Schwartz, not a man sario-the Diaghilev of modernist poetry-who noted for heightened rhetoric or empty ecstasy, finally flipped, betraying both his country and referred to the poet as "a kind of priest." To those himself. These poets did not, except occasionally, for whom literature, and culture generally, came teach. Occupationally, they ranged from physi- increasingly to stand in as a substitute for religion, cian (William Carlos Williams) to editor (Mari- poetry-and modern poetry specifically-was anne Moore) to insurance executive (Wallace Stev- High Church. ens); in personal style, from traditionally formal The copyright date on my edition of Oscar (T. S. Eliot) to bohemian (E. E. Cummings) to Williams's anthology is 1950, and it was during suicidally desperate (Hart Crane). But for all their the 1950's that poetry last had this religious aura. variety, no one would ever think to describe them Many of the high priests of the cult-T. S. Eliot as academic. and Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and William They were, however, the first living poets to be Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings and W. H. given the full academic treatment. Their works Auden-were still alive and still writing, even if were dissected in classrooms, the intellectual quar- terlies ran solemn essays about them even while JOSEPH EPSTEIN is the author of PlausiblePrejudices and Once More Around the Block, among other books. A new collection continuing to run their poems, book-length crit- of his essays, Partial Payments, will be published by Norton itical studies about them began to be written and early next year. continue to be written even now. Their fame was 13 14/COMMENTARY AUGUST 1988 neither of the general nor of the wealth-producing would one day know it, too. But the poets who kind that Ernest Hemingway and William came after them were less sure; they knew some- Faulkner knew-though T. S. Eliot was an thing had gone wrong. And they were right. It international celebrity-but within the circumam- had. bience of the university they were revered. No body of critical writing produced during this period was EFORE I attempt to get at what I be- more efficacious than that of T. S. Eliot, whose lieve has happened, perhaps I ought essays could affect the reputation-"the place in to describe what I think is the situation of con- the canon," as academics now put it-of writers temporary poetry. Pressed to formulate this situ- born three hundred years earlier. In the view of ation in a single sentence, I should write: con- F. R. Leavis, Eliot, along with Samuel Johnson, temporary poetry in the United States flourishes Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, is one of the four in a vacuum. Today there are more than 250 great English literary critics, yet without the au- universities with creative-writing programs, and thority lent his criticism by his poetry, it is plain all of these have a poetry component, which that Eliot's critical power would have been no- means that they not only train aspiring poets but where near so great. hire men and women who have published poetry But the clearest evidence of the reverence in to teach them. Many of these men and women which these poets were held is found in the way go from being students in one writing program they were worshipped by the generation of poets, to being teachers in another-without, you might or at least those in America, who followed them. say, their feet, metrical or anatomical, having Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, touched the floor. Many colleges and universities Delmore Schwartz not only wrote some of the most that do not have formal writing programs none- brilliant essays on their immediate poetic fore- theless hire poets to teach a creative-writing course bears, but in their lives they tended to be obsessed or two; and the course in writing poetry has also with them. The young Robert Lowell set up a become a staple of the community-college and tent on the lawn of the home of Allen Tate, to adult-education menu. None of this puts poets up learn at the feet of one of his masters. Delmore there with the Helmsleys and the Trumps, but it Schwartz viewed T. S. Eliot as a culture hero, pure has made it possible for a large number of poets- though not so simple, and his letters and conver- and more than 6,300 poets and other writers are sation were filled with references to Eliot. Randall listed in the most recent edition of the Directory Jarrell, after writing about Wallace Stevens's lat- of American Poets and Fiction Writers-to earn ter-day weaknesses, capped his criticism with the their living in work closely connected with their thought that Stevens was "one of the true poets craft. Such work, thirty or so years ago, was of our century, someone whom the world will available only to a small handful of poets, and keep on reading just as it keeps on listening to these of the highest stature. Vivaldi or Scarlatti, looking at Tiepolo or Pous- Robert Frost, when in his eighties and a great sin." draw on the poetry-reading circuit, thought it a Jarrell, Lowell, Berryman, Schwartz, as anyone good thing that poets had become teachers "in who has read much about them cannot mistake, a thousand, two thousand colleges," and added were all immensely ambitious men. Had their that colleges and universities gave poets "the best ambitions been applied to business or politics or audiences poetry ever had in this world." Writing perhaps anything other than careers in poetry- in 1985, in an essay entitled "The Poetry Reading: and all four were the most careful caretakers of Public Performance/Private Act," the poet Donald their careers-they might not have ended as sadly Hall noted: "In the past thirty years, the poetry as they did: in repeated mental breakdown, alco- reading, which used to be rare, has become the holism, early death, and suicide. I believe poetry chief form of publication for American poets. was implicated in their disastrous lives in that they Annually, hundreds of thousands of listeners hear had set out to forge brilliant careers like those of tens of thousands of readings." The great majority their predecessors and knew that, for a complex of these take place on college campuses, but many of reasons, they could not make it. Jarrell wrote others are given at such cultural centers as the an essay entitled "The Obscurity of the Poet," 92nd Street Y in New York, the Poetry Center at which he claimed had to be surmounted if civ- the Art Institute in Chicago, the International ilization were to carry on, and another entitled Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, not to mention var- "The Taste of the Age," which he found trashy.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • S K E N È Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies
    S K E N È Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 1:1 2015 The Chorus in Drama Edited by Guido Avezzù SKENÈ Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies Executive Editor Guido Avezzù. General Editors Guido Avezzù, Silvia Bigliazzi, Alessandro Serpieri. Editorial Board Simona Brunetti, Lisanna Calvi, Nicola Pasqualicchio, Gherardo Ugolini. Managing Editors Lisanna Calvi, Ivan Valbusa. Copyeditors Christine Chettle, Marco Duranti, Lucia Nigri, Flavia Palma, Carlo Vareschi, Tobia Zanon. Layout Editor Alex Zanutto. Advisory Board Anna Maria Belardinelli, Anton Bierl, Enoch Brater, Jean-Christophe Cavallin, Marco De Marinis, Tobias Döring, Paul Edmondson, Keir Douglas Elam, Ewan Fernie, Patrick Finglass, Enrico Giaccherini, Mark Griffith, Stephen Halliwell, Robert Henke, Pierre Judet de la Combe, Russ McDonald, Luigina Mortari, Guido Paduano, Franco Perrelli, Didier Plassard. Copyright © 2015 SKENÈ All rights reserved. ISSN 2421-4353 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher. SKENÈ Theatre and Drama Studies http://www.skenejournal.it [email protected] Alessandra Calanchi∗ Of Men and Ghosts: Delmore Schwartz’s Re-visitation of the Greek Chorus Abstract Among the many elements of interest we encounter in Delmore Schwartz’s literary production, the re–visitation of the Greek chorus is particularly relevant. Its innov- atory appeal, in fact, never ignores the call of tradition, and is rooted on the main issues of American culture, from immigration and problematic assimilation to the rise of
    [Show full text]
  • April 2005 Updrafts
    Chaparral from the California Federation of Chaparral Poets, Inc. serving Californiaupdr poets for over 60 yearsaftsVolume 66, No. 3 • April, 2005 President Ted Kooser is Pulitzer Prize Winner James Shuman, PSJ 2005 has been a busy year for Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. On April 7, the Pulitzer commit- First Vice President tee announced that his Delights & Shadows had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And, Jeremy Shuman, PSJ later in the week, he accepted appointment to serve a second term as Poet Laureate. Second Vice President While many previous Poets Laureate have also Katharine Wilson, RF Winners of the Pulitzer Prize receive a $10,000 award. Third Vice President been winners of the Pulitzer, not since 1947 has the Pegasus Buchanan, Tw prize been won by the sitting laureate. In that year, A professor of English at the University of Ne- braska-Lincoln, Kooser’s award-winning book, De- Fourth Vice President Robert Lowell won— and at the time the position Eric Donald, Or was known as the Consultant in Poetry to the Li- lights & Shadows, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2004. Treasurer brary of Congress. It was not until 1986 that the po- Ursula Gibson, Tw sition became known as the Poet Laureate Consult- “I’m thrilled by this,” Kooser said shortly after Recording Secretary ant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. the announcement. “ It’s something every poet dreams Lee Collins, Tw The 89th annual prizes in Journalism, Letters, of. There are so many gifted poets in this country, Corresponding Secretary Drama and Music were announced by Columbia Uni- and so many marvelous collections published each Dorothy Marshall, Tw versity.
    [Show full text]
  • She Whose Eyes Are Open Forever”: Does Protest Poetry Matter?
    commentary by JAMES GLEASON BISHOP “she whose eyes are open forever”: Does Protest Poetry Matter? ne warm June morning in 1985, I maneuvered my rusty yellow Escort over shin-deep ruts in my trailer park to pick up Adam, a young enlisted aircraft mechanic. Adam had one toddler and one newborn to Osupport. My two children were one and two years old. To save money, we carpooled 11 miles to Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. We were on a flight path for B-52s hangared at Griffiss, though none were flying that morning. On the long entryway to the security gate, Adam and I passed a group of people protesting nuclear weapons on base. They had drawn chalk figures of humans in our lane along the base access road. Adam and I ran over the drawings without comment. A man. A pregnant woman. Two children—clearly a girl and boy. As I drove toward the security gate, a protestor with long sandy hair waved a sign at us. She was standing in the center of the road, between lanes. Another 15 protestors lined both sides of the roads, but she was alone in the middle, waving her tall, heavy cardboard sign with block hand lettering: WE DON’T WANT YOUR NUKES! A year earlier, I’d graduated from college and joined the Air Force. With my professors’ Sixties zeitgeist lingering in my mind, I smiled and waved, gave her the thumbs up. Adam looked away, mumbled, “Don’t do that.” After the gate guard checked our IDs, Adam told me why he disliked the protestors.
    [Show full text]
  • Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman's Dream Songs
    Imaginary Jews and True Confessions: Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman’s Dream Songs ANDREW GROSS . Jews, who have changed much in the course of history, are certainly no race, [but] the anti‐Semites in a way are a race, because they always use the same slogans, display the same attitudes, indeed almost look alike. —Max Horkheimer1 John Berryman’s “The Imaginary Jew,” published in the Kenyon Review of 1945, is in some ways a rather programmatic account of one man’s conversion from parlor anti‐ Semitism to a feeling of solidarity with Jews. The climax occurs when a bigot accuses the narrator of being Jewish in order to discredit him in an argument over Roosevelt’s foreign policy prior to the American entry into World War II. The accusation completely unnerves the narrator in ways he does not immediately understand, and he is shocked to see that it discredits him in the eyes of the crowd, which has assembled at Union Square to hear impromptu debates. Later, after leaving the scene of his embarrassment, he decides to lay claim to this mistaken, or imaginary, identity, and comes to the following conclusion about the nature of prejudice: “My persecutors were right: I was a Jew. The imaginary Jew I was was as real as the imaginary Jew hunted down, on other nights and days, in a real Jew. Every murderer strikes the mirror, the lash of the torturer falls on the mirror and cuts the real image, and the real and the imaginary blood flow down together.”2 The story garnered some attention when it appeared in 1945.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernist Ekphrasis and Museum Politics
    1 BEYOND THE FRAME: MODERNIST EKPHRASIS AND MUSEUM POLITICS A dissertation presented By Frank Robert Capogna to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April 2017 2 BEYOND THE FRAME: MODERNIST EKPHRASIS AND MUSEUM POLITICS A dissertation presented By Frank Robert Capogna ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University April 2017 3 ABSTRACT This dissertation argues that the public art museum and its practices of collecting, organizing, and defining cultures at once enabled and constrained the poetic forms and subjects available to American and British poets of a transatlantic long modernist period. I trace these lines of influence particularly as they shape modernist engagements with ekphrasis, the historical genre of poetry that describes, contemplates, or interrogates a visual art object. Drawing on a range of materials and theoretical formations—from archival documents that attest to modernist poets’ lived experiences in museums and galleries to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art and critical scholarship in the field of Museum Studies—I situate modernist ekphrastic poetry in relation to developments in twentieth-century museology and to the revolutionary literary and visual aesthetics of early twentieth-century modernism. This juxtaposition reveals how modern poets revised the conventions of, and recalibrated the expectations for, ekphrastic poetry to evaluate the museum’s cultural capital and its then common marginalization of the art and experiences of female subjects, queer subjects, and subjects of color.
    [Show full text]
  • William Carlos Williams' Indian Son(G)
    The News from That Strange, Far Away Land: William Carlos Williams’ Indian Son(g) Graziano Krätli YALE UNIVERSITY 1. In his later years, William Carlos Williams entertained a long epistolary relationship with the Indian poet Srinivas Rayaprol (1925-98), one of a handful who contributed to the modernization of Indian poetry in English in the first few decades after the independence from British rule. The two met only once or twice, but their correspondence, started in the fall of 1949, when Rayaprol was a graduate student at Stanford University, continued long after his return to India, ending only a few years before Williams’ passing. Although Williams had many correspondents in his life, most of them more important and better known literary figures than Rayaprol, the young Indian from the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh was one of the very few non-Americans and the only one from a postcolonial country with a long and glorious literary tradition of its own. More important, perhaps, their correspondence occurred in a decade – the 1950s – in which a younger generation of Indian poets writing in English was assimilating the lessons of Anglo-American Modernism while increasingly turning their attention away from Britain to America. Rayaprol, doubly advantaged by virtue of “being there” (i.e., in the Bay Area at the beginning of the San Francisco Renaissance) and by his mentoring relationship with Williams, was one of the very first to imbibe the new poetic idiom from its sources, and also one of the most persistent in trying to keep those sources alive and meaningful, to him if not to his fellow poets in India.
    [Show full text]
  • Open Shalkey Honors Thesis.Pdf
    THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH THE CONFESSIONAL POETS: REMOVING THE MASK OF IMPERSONALITY WITH ALL THE SKILLS OF THE MODERNISTS VANESSA SHALKEY Spring 2012 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in English and International Politics with honors in English Reviewed and approved* by the following: John Marsh Assistant Professor of English Thesis Supervisor Lisa Sternlieb English Honors Advisor Honors Advisor Christopher Castiglia Liberal Arts Research Professor of English CALS Senior Scholar in Residence Second Reader *Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. !! ABSTRACT The pioneers of the frontier of new art forms have always made themselves vulnerable to the criticism of the previous generation; however, this criticism often overshadows and undermines the true success of these bold artists. The confessional poets were some of these trailblazers who took American poetry into areas untouched by previous generations and were criticized for breaking with the traditional methods of past poets--especially the modernists. Poets like Robert Lowell and John Berryman used their life events as subject matter for their poetry, which the New Critics thought was bad form. This controversial shift in style won these poets the name “confessional,” a title that many of the poets to whom it refers found disparaging. The label “confessional” gives the impression that these poets did little more than use their poems as diary entries, when in fact they wrote magnificent poetry with the same talent and technical skills that the modernist poets displayed. This thesis is an examination of the confessional poets’ use of effective poetic devices favored by the modernist poets to analyze whether or not the act of removing the mask of impersonality negatively impacted the ability of the confessional poets to develop complex themes and transmute feelings to the reader.
    [Show full text]
  • Randall Jarrell - Poems
    Classic Poetry Series Randall Jarrell - poems - Publication Date: 2004 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Randall Jarrell(May 6, 1914 – October 14, 1965) Poet, critic and teacher, Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Anna (Campbell) and Owen Jarrell on May 6, 1914. Mr. Jarrell attended the Vanderbilt University and later taught at the University of Texas. Mr. Jarrell also taught a year at Princeton and also at the University of Illinois; he did a two-year appointment as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress. Randall Jarrell published many novels througout his lifetime and one of his most well known works was in 1960, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo". Upon Mr. Jarrells passing, Peter Taylor (A well known fiction writer and friend of Mr. Jarrell) said, "To Randall's friends there was always the feeling that he was their teacher. To Randall's students there was always the feeling that he was their friend. And with good reason for both." Lowell said of Jarrell, "Now that he is gone, I see clearly that the spark of heaven really struck and irradiated the lines and being of my dear old friend—his noble, difficult and beautiful soul." www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 90 North At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe, I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides I sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard, My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole. There in the childish night my companions lay frozen, The stiff fur knocked at my starveling throat, And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling, Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Notes Introduction 1. Delmore Schwartz, Last & Lost Poems, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Vanguard Press, 1979), 4. The poem is dated 1954, but it gathers preoccupations from over a decade earlier. 2. Walt Whitman, “Preface 1855—Leaves of Grass, First Edition,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 616. 3. James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976). The rock star Lou Reed, a former student, dedicated the song “European Son,” on the album The Velvet Underground & Nico, to Schwartz. 4. Delmore Schwartz, Genesis (New York: New Directions, 1943), 5. 5. Delmore Schwartz, “America! America!” in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories, 20. 6. Delmore Schwartz, “The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway: Moral Historian of the American Dream” (1955), in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 271. 7. Schwartz, “The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway,” 272. 8. Howe, “Foreword to Atlas, ed.,” in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and Other Stories, vii; Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978), 25. 9. Cited in DS & JL Letters, 47. 10. Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 154. Eliot regretted that he was unable to bring out a British edition of Schwartz’s poems. 11. Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 129. Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1981), December 27, 1940, 382. 12. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (London: Faber, 1990) (149), 168. 13. Delmore Schwartz, “Views of a Second Violinist” (1949), in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 25. 14. He was also film editor of The New Republic between 1955 and 1957.
    [Show full text]
  • Elizabeth Bishop's "Damned 'Fish'"
    Journal X Volume 3 Number 2 Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 1999) Article 5 2020 The One That Got Away: Elizabeth Bishop's "damned 'Fish'" Anne Colwell University of Delaware Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Colwell, Anne (2020) "The One That Got Away: Elizabeth Bishop's "damned 'Fish'"," Journal X: Vol. 3 : No. 2 , Article 5. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx/vol3/iss2/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal X by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Colwell: The One That Got Away: Elizabeth Bishop's "damned 'Fish'" The One That Got Away: Elizabeth Bishop's “damned Fish’” Anne Colwell Anne Colwell, an Everyone who writes about Elizabeth Bishops Associate Professor of poems must comment on her "powers of observa­ English at the Univer­ tion.” It’s a rule. Randall Jarrell’s famous early sity ofDelawar e, is the review remains one of the pithiest of these com­ ments: "All her poems have written underneath I author of Inscrutable have seen it” (235). And many critics, before and Houses: Metaphors since Jarrell, base their readings of Bishop’s poems on of the Body in the the assumption of her realism. Lloyd Frankenberg Poems of Elizabeth writes, "hers is a clearly delineated world” of "percep- Bishop (U ofAlabama tion[,] precision, compression” (331, 333). Walker P). Her poems appear Percy argues that the true subject of her poetry is the act of perception itself (14).
    [Show full text]
  • FOREWORD by David Lehman
    FOREWORD by David Lehman Susan Wheeler was telling me about the writing work- shop she took as a Bennington College undergrad- uate in the 1970s. On the Arst day Alvin Feinman, who taught the class, asked the students to bring in their favorite poems. Some fulAlled the assignment with approved masterworks on the order of “East Coker” or the Duino Elegies. Wheeler chose Karl Shapiro’s “Buick,” a “shorter, speedy poem” that seemed “incon- sequential” next to the weighty works of Eliot or Rilke. I like this anecdote not only because it makes its point about not going with the Bow but because in my stu- dent days I, too, had an intense experience with this now neglected poet’s rhapsodic ode to his car. It ex- pressed something real and otherwise overlooked in metrically rich verse: As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans, Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride. Karl Shapiro, who died in May 2000 at the age of eighty-six, wrote other poems imbued with the aura of the 1940s. He portrays American institutions in “Haircut” (“In mirrors of marble and silver I see us for- ever”), “Drug Store” (“They slump in booths like rags, not even drunk”), and “University” (“To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew / Is the curriculum”). Some of his most admired works bear witness to the casualties of World War II, in which he served.
    [Show full text]
  • Stuart Wright Booklet
    Joyner Library Presents Stuart Wright: A Life In Collecting September 7, 2011 A Message from the Dean East Carolina University® Like Tom Douglass, I first met Stuart Wright when I stepped off the train with my wife Sue in Ludlow, England—the English country squire waiting for us soon proved to be a Southern Gentleman in exile. In fact, I think this was confirmed the night STUART WRIGHT: Sue prepared “southern fried chicken” and mashed potatoes. Stuart asked for the recipe after his first helping, feasted on the leftovers for several days, and said it The Badger of Old Street stirred memories in him from long ago. On our short visit to 28 Old Street, Stuart showed and told us as much as we could absorb about the extraordinary collection of southern American literature that he hoped would eventually come to East Carolina University and Joyner Library. I was delighted with what I saw and heard and carefully calculated how much space we would need to house the collection if we could agree on price and terms. Being only acquainted with the work of some of the authors like Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Eudora Welty, I could not truly appreciate the importance of the book collection or the exceptional quality of the many boxes of letters, journals, and manuscripts that comprised the collection. Fortunately, Tom Douglass could and he and Stuart spent many hours poring over the materials and discussing their significance while I could only listen in amazement. My amazement and delight have only increased markedly since the collection has come to Joyner Library.
    [Show full text]