R. P. Blackmur was an American critic and poet, as well as a
professor of English literature and creative writing at Princeton
University. At the time of his death, he had completed five books
and a number of plays and short stories. His poetry mattered most
to him and some of it is permanent work. He devoted much of his
life to a biography of Henry Adams, someone he saw in himself. In
his lifetime, he received his share of adulation, but he was not
successful in the way that success is commonly measured.
In this work, Russell Fraser follows the course of Blackmur's
self-declared failed genius. He tells the story of his precocious
youth in Cambridge; his eclectic education; his years of poverty
and renown as a poet, novelist, freelance music critic, and
essayist; his obsessive marriage to artist Helen Dickson; his
entangled friendships with T. S. Eliot, Delmore Schwartz, Allen
Tate, and John Berryman; and his passion for rural Maine on the
Tidal Water. He discusses Blackmur's crucial role in the literary
magazines of the twenties and thirties; his unique influence as
instructor of creative writing; the emotional and professional
price he paid for a doubtful security at Princeton University; and
the torment of wavering between intellectual inertia and prolific
inspiration.
With empathy and insight, Fraser shows how the trajectory of
Blackmur's career parallels the movements in the American literary
scene; the experiments in poetry and fiction; the development of
the New Criticism; the writer's conflict between order and anarchy,
taxonomy and the full response; and the emergence of the critic as
artist. A biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism,
"A Mingled Yarn" unravels Blackmur's complex character and
celebrates his great achievement.
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