"Old Poets is an indispensable jewel."
--Washington Post
"An astonishing array of encounters...Hall's observations are shrewd and
generous."
--Boston Globe
Intimate 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 poets' 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, "The 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."
Hall's 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 Frost's 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, "old enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel
alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren."
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: "Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost," "Dylan Thomas
and Public Suicide," "Notes on T. S. Eliot," "Rocks and Whirlpools:
Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters," "Marianne Moore: Valiant and
Alien," and "Fragments of Ezra Pound."
For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to
compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest
bookstore--as Hall writes, "Their presences have been emblems in my
life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone."
