RICHARD WILBUR: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

Richard Wilbur, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and America's second Poet Laureate, died last Saturday. My obit of him went up at the Guardian online Tuesday; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. I had actually written it quite a while ago, probably about ten years ago, long enough that it was saved in my computer in Microsoft Works! However it didn't require much updating, and I was very happy with what I'd written then.

When I was at Wesleyan, Wilbur was one of the two glamorous figures in the English department. The other was F.D. Reeve (father of the actor Christopher), whose obituary I also wrote, four years ago for the Independent. You can link to that one here. What links the two, apart from their patrician elegance, is Robert Frost and Russia. Reeve was Frost's translator when the older poet went to Russia, Wilbur translated Russians, especially Yevtushenko. But more importantly, Wilbur really was the heir to Frost's position as an American poet. His work has the same precision of language, the same sensitivity to the natural world, the same sense of some sort of moral agency behind it, though crucially I find Wilbur's world-view far less dark and far more approachable in our time than Frost's. I almost see it more in Wilbur's blank verse, and occasional free verse, than in the rhymed poems, but it's certainly there. That he was never able to assume Frost's centrality in America's public arts world speaks more to the changes both in American poetry and American society than it does to Wilbur.

I saw him compared to both Auden and Larkin in some obituaries, and it's easy enough to see why. But he's not as showy with his language as Auden, and he's nowhere near as misanthropic, as presumptively world-weary as Larkin. Somehow it's hard to imagine either of those poets translating Moliere with the playful verve Wilbur managed--I do recommend those to anyone still reading this far!

I was lucky enough to take two courses with Wilbur. One was his basic poetry course, where as I say in the obit, his breakdown of a wide range of poets was stunning: his command of the deeper meaning of words, their roots, their sounds, their usages was comprehensive, and he liked poets who could use words deftly and unusually: Hopkins and Cummings, I recall. I then came back and got into his verse writing course the following year, by which time, after the student strike of 1970, I had decided I should be studying those subjects I wanted to study. Wilbur had been one of the professors most supportive of the strike; I remember cycling round campus with the strike paper the morning his poem 'For The Student Strikers' appeared, hawking it like a newsie with a headline: 'Strike paper! Wilbur Poem! Getcher Wilbur poem here'.  The photo above left shows the documentary film-maker Stephen Talbot leading an anti-war march in Middletown in 1969: if you closely behind him you'll see Wilbur, a few rows back, unprepossessingly marching with the students.

I had published a poem when I was 16, in the New Haven Register, but I should have realised just how big a step a class with him would be. Wilbur was not a touchy-feely kind of teacher, but each assignment came back with thoughtful (and gentle) criticism of my work. I can recall one short exercise I wrote for him, a riddle, and he took great pleasure in guessing it, correctly of course.

At some point after that class, I discovered Charles Olson, a Wesleyan alumnus, and my view of poetry changed completely. I wish I'd been able to start making that leap while I was submitting poems to Wilbur, because his input probably would have spurred me on. But though the style I began to absorb from Olson was very different to Wilbur's I never lost my desire to be able to express myself with a mere fraction of Wilbur's acuity, grace, and precision.

It was a privilege to be able to write Wilbur's obit and note his passing for a British audience. I hope I did him justice. I just wish the paper would occasionally use a younger photo of poets who lived nearly 100 years! The first photo at top right is of the young poet; the one just above to the right is from about the time I was a student at Wesleyan, and how I remember him. RIP

KEVIN JACKSON'S CONSTELLATION OF GENIUS

My favourite book of 2015 was Kevin Jackson's Constellation Of Genius, which was published in 2012 but being me I only caught up to it this summer. It's subtitled 1922: Modernism And All That Jazz and it is basically a diary of a year which Jackson says was the start of a new age. Or rather, Ezra Pound said it, calling it year one 'post scriptum Ulixi' or after the writing of Ulysses. Of course, Pound's new epoch soon was subsumed in his enthusiasm for Mussolini, but that's a different constellation. In his introduction Jackson acknowledges that what we think of as modernism actually arises over a period of time that begins nearly two decades earlier, but his view is predominantly literary, and predominantly Anglo-centric, and 1922 therefore makes sense, bracketed as it were by James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. 1922 was also the year William Carlos Williams published Spring And All, revolutionary in its own way, but it passes without notice here.  

But the book is not designed as an argument; it is an unfolding of a year presented as an outflowing of ideas, and as such becomes a joy to follow. It created a dilemma for me as a reader: did I keep it handy to simply dip into bit by bit, entranced by its surprises and welcoming its invitations to make connections and consider our perceptions of art, or should I just surrender to the momentum of the calendar, and read along in a flurry of excitement? How many books do you read these days that create excitement? The same sort that reading Ulysses for the first time did, or Hemingway's In Our Time, which remains to me his finest work (along with some of the other early stories).

Not that these were being read widely in 1922. Having grown up studying them, seen them as if displayed behind perspex, we forget the nature of the world they started to overturn. That is why I said Anglo-centric, even though Joyce is Irish and Eliot and Pound are American. Here's a home-grown English modernist, Virginia Woolf, as quoted by Jackson, about Ulysses: 

“and Tom [Eliot} great Tom, thinks it on a par with War And Peace! An illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood”

This puts the problems of literary modernism into a nutshell. Growing up in the Sixties, in America, my perception of Eliot was coloured by his bastard offspring, the 'New Critics', and the coded interpretations of modern reference that entailed, their clinging on to the elitism of a sort of upper-middle class experimentation. I mentioned William Carlos Williams' 1922 book going unmentioned here; Williams himself noted, when he read The Waste Land it 'set me back twenty years'.

In my upbringing, the world of Elliott and Woolf was being overturned by the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets (though Charles Olson's personal mythology needed as many footnotes as Eliot's) and a new freedom of language and, yes, raw expression. Eliot seemed a Yank who had gone 'over there' and not come back, as Frost or Hemingway or Cummings had; moreover he had adapted the protective colouration of the old world, a reversal of classic American 'going native'. Yet to those whose colouration he adopted, the raw savages were 'self-taught working men'. But it was amazing to me, when I moved to Britain in the late Seventies, to discover how important Eliot was still to the older generation of artists, how liberating his work, which I considered constricted, actually had been, and still was to them, and I revisited it through a new perspective as a result.

In light of this, Ezra Pound, whose influence wound up being far greater in America, and who is in many ways the central figure in Jackson's book, gets short shift. He was the mover and shaker in the literary world of London and Paris, but more important, and what doesn't receive notice here, is the way Pound absolutely transformed The Waste Land. His editing on it was immense and made it something it would not have been otherwise, a challenge to both language and formal constraint. The line from Eliot through the Imagists to the poets I mentioned earlier, proceeds directly through Pound, and I would argue only because of him.

But as I said, this is not a book of argument, it is one of connection. And as I followed its progress through the year, I thought of the photos of the great artistic experimenters of that era, the bohemians, the surrealists, the modernists, and how they are always posed formally, in their suits and collars, or at least neckties; how this was a world whose boundaries they were knocking down while still remaining at least on the surface tied to them. I wish Jackson might have included more about actual jazz, though I'm not convinced 1922 is a crucial year. I reviewed once, for the Spectator, Philip Larkin's writings on jazz; it occurred to me that his adulation of the early twenties and Louis Armstrong, and his ultimate disdain for almost everything that followed, was a form of fetishism for the liberating sense that music brought him in his youth, a freedom from the strictures of his upbringing.

And that was what I kept coming back to, how revealing this book is about the world that was being changed or at least challenged by modernism. Again, I call on Woolf, commenting on the death of Kitty Maxse, thought of as the model for Mrs. Dalloway, who fell down a flight of stairs. 'Still it seems a pity Kitty did kill herself: but of course she was an awful snob'. Ms. Pot does not seem very modernist at all. I may have connected with Constellation Of Genius because it took me back, as much to the England which I encountered in 1977 as it did to 1922, an England that was in many ways far closer to the world 50 years earlier than it is to a world only 40 years later. The book sits by my bedside still, and I still dip into it. The best of both worlds. Again, how many books rate such a position?

Constellation Of Genius by Kevin Jackson

Windmill Books, £9.99, ISBN 9780099559023

F.D. REEVE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the poet and translator F.D. Reeve, father of the actor Christopher, is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. Because I had been at Wesleyan when Reeve was teaching there, I wrote a bit more than I'd been asked. In my researching I found the lists of poetry readings at the Honors College, and saw that I had read with other student poets not long after Reeve had performed as 'the Blue Cat'. Because my friend Seth Davis was in the College of Letters, he knew him well. Seth was kind enough to share his memories with me, thus the piece may give the impression I knew Reeve, which isn't so. Because I over-wrote, little bits were trimmed here and there in the paper. Rather than explain what's gone, I'll just post my copy here. Seth is the student who received an evaluation written in rhyming couplets--among the other differences are my description of the Frost-Krushchev confrontation as 'ill-tempered', my analysis of Richard Wilbur's translations from Russian, and the reference to Reeve's 2005 novel My Sister Life.

F.D. REEVE: POET AND TRANSLATOR

In the early stages of his career, the poet F.D. Reeve, who has died aged 84, found himself best-known as the translator who accompanied Robert Frost on his famous 1962 visit to the Soviet Union, the man in the middle of Frost's ill-tempered showdown with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Years later, having established himself as a poet, novelist, and translator, Reeve would find himself overshadowed again, by his eldest son Christopher, who achieved worldwide fame as the actor playing Superman in the smash 1978 movie hit.

Ironically, Reeve himself had given up acting to pursue poetry. If anything, he was better-looking than his son; I was a student at Wesleyan University when Reeve was a leading light in the inter-disciplinary College of Letters and his poetry was receiving its highest acclaim. Richard Wilbur was the University's poet in residence, and the two shared an almost impossibly handsome patrician elegance. I found that most striking when they performed on campus with the Russian poet Andrei Vozhnesensky, reading translations of his work. Reeve was fluent in Russian; Wilbur didn't speak the language but worked from Reeve's literal translation and his own sense of the intonation, meter and rhyme . The dueling verses were equally thrilling.

Franklin D’Olier Reeve was born in Philadelphia 18 September 1928. His father ran Prudential Financial, and although F.D. often told students his middle name was Delano, after President Roosevelt, D'Olier was his mother's family name. He was educated at the elite Philips Exeter Academy, and then at Princeton, where he studied under the poet and critic R.P. Blackmur, and became entranced with Russian literature after reading Anna Karenina. After graduation he travelled in Europe and worked in the Dakotas harvesting wheat, which would provide the material for his first novel, Red Machines (1968). In 1951, he married Barbara Lamb; Christopher was born in 1952 and a second son, Benjamin in 1953.

Reeve began graduate work at Columbia University, while working as a longshoreman and a jobbing actor. But he quit acting because he said he would have to 'give up too much of my inner self' to continue writing poetry. In 1956, he and Lamb divorced; she took the children to Princeton, and married a stockbroker, while he married a fellow Columbia student, Helen Schmidinger. That marriage also ended in divorce, as did his third, to Ellen Swift. His relationship with Christopher would always be difficult, and didn't improve with the son's fame. In interviews Christopher spoke of resentment toward his father over the bitterness of the marital break-up, and the awkwardness of his shared upbringing.

When F.D. Reeve gave his first public poetry reading, in New York, he was introduced by Blackmur, and shared the stage with Denise Levertov and the priest and future anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan. He received his PhD in 1958, and taught Russian at Columbia, where his first book, a study of Aleksandr Blok, was published in 1962. By then, he'd been selected for one of the first academic exchanges with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which led to his selection as Frost's translator. Later he wrote a fine memoir of the trip, Robert Frost in Russia (1964), noting how he used the trip to introduce Frost, and himself, to the younger, more open, generation of Soviet writers.

After returning from Russia in 1962, he moved to Wesleyan, where he taught for 40 years. Originally head of the Russian department, he gave up tenure for an adjunct position in the College of Letters, which allowed him freedom to live and work elsewhere, eventually in Vermont, for parts of the year; particularly at Yale from 1974-86. He was a popular teacher, renowned in my time for his evaluation of one star student's colloquium, written entirely in rhymed couplets. That was his most successful period of writing; between 1968 and 1973 his first two collections of poetry, In The Silent Stones and The Blue Cat were published by major publishers, as were his next three novels, Just Over The Border, The Brother, and White Colours (1973). He would not publish another novel until My Sister Life in 2005.

Reeve translated Turgenev's short novels, and produced two anthologies of Russian drama. His renaissance as a writer was triggered by his move to Vermont, where he settled eventually in Wilmington with his fourth wife, creative writing professor Laura Stevenson. His third book of poetry, Nightway, finally appeared in 1987, followed by an exceptional critical work, White Monk (1989) tying together Dostoevsky and Melville. Between 1992 and 2010 seven more books of poetry appeared from independent presses, as well as a selected poems, A World You Haven't Seen (2001). He wrote two books of short stories based around his working on the Hudson River docks, and translated poetry by Bella Akhmadulina and Leonid Andreyev's 1908 novel Seven Who Were Hanged, which took on added resonance in the age of terrorism. His last published work was the novel Nathaniel Purple (2012) set in rural Vermont.

Reeve died 28 June 2013 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, of complications from diabetes. He is survived by Stevenson, his son from his first marriage, and a son and two daughters from his second. In a 2002 poem, 'Home In Wartime' Reeve wrote:

If I die first, gather the lost years
with the late September apples. At sunset ghost me
beside you on the steps to watch
the tangerine-lavender clouds turn gray.
Go on, go on.