Old PoetsAuthor :
Hardback
Published : Thursday 10 February 2022
Description
â?oOld Poets is an indispensable jewel.â??â?"Washington Postâ?oAn astonishing array of encounters...Hallâ?Ts observations are shrewd and generous.â??â?"Boston GlobeIntimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and context to the often flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poetsâ?T existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall (Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things come together in this unique collection. We hear about Robert Frost as Hall knew him: vain and cruel, a man possessed by guilt. But, as Hall writes, â?oThe poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: He looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on.â??Hallâ?Ts essays are once both intimate portraits and learned treatises. He takes us on a pub crawl through the Welsh countryside with the word-mad Dylan Thomas; to the Faber & Faber office of T. S. Eliot, who had discovered more happiness in age than in youth; to a reading where Robert Frostâ?Ts public persona hid the truth; to Brooklyn for lunch with the enigmatic Marianne Moore; and to Italy and for a visit with the notorious Ezra Pound. By the time Hall met them, each poet was, he observed, â?oold enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren.â??Also included are portraits of the poets who taught Hall as a writer: the unfailingly kind Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, from whom he learned the most about poetry. Along the way are observations about many other poets and the literary cultures that sustained them. Contents include: â?oVanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost,â?? â?oDylan Thomas and Public Suicide,â?? â?oNotes on T. S. Eliot,â?? â?oRocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters,â?? â?oMarianne Moore: Valiant and Alien,â?? and â?oFragments of Ezra Pound.â??For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest bookstoreâ?"as Hall writes, â?oTheir presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone.â??
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