"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."
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