Donald Hall - Old Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions

Published in 2021 by

GODINE

Boston, Massachusetts

A version of this book was originally published by Ticknor & Fields, a division of Houghton Mifflin, in 1992 under the title Their Ancient Glittering Eyes.

Copyright 1992 by Donald Hall

Introduction Copyright 2021 by Wesley McNair

all rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, visit www.godine.com

Copyright acknowledgments appear .

Portions of this book previously appeared in Commentary, Lears, the Paris Review, and American Poetry Review.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Hall, Donald, 1928-2018 , author. | McNair, Wesley, writer of introduction.

Title: Old poets : reminiscences & opinions / Donald Hall ; with an introduction by Wesley McNair.

Description: Boston, Massachusetts : Godine, 2021 .

Identifiers: LCCN 2020048405 (print) | LCCN 2020048406 (ebook) | ISBN 9781567926958 (hardback) | ISBN 9781567926965 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Poets. | Poetry. | Old age. | LCGFT: Essays.

Classification: LCC PS 3515 .A 3152 O 47 2021 (print) | LCC PS 3515 .A 3152 (ebook) | DDC 814/.54 --dc

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2020048405

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2020048406

To Charles Christensen

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

william wordsworth ,
Resolution and Independence

We work in the darkwe do what we canwe give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

henry james , The Middle Years

I have long since made up my mind not to seek the acquaintance of poets.

henry adams , from a letter

There, on the mountain and the sky,

On all the tragic scene they stare.

One asks for mournful melodies;

Accomplished fingers begin to play.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

william butler yeats , Lapis Lazuli

Contents

I n the early 1970 s, Donald Hall spent two years researching and beginning to write a biography of the Academy Awardwinning actor Charles Laughton, best known as Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But when the actors widow read drafts of early chapters and disagreed with Halls approach, the book was promptly canceled. The biography was, by Halls own admission, an odd project for the poet. But after the response he received for his now iconic essay collection String Too Short to be Saved in 1961 , hed been eager to stretch himself into more prose writing.

When the Laughton biography imploded, Hall accepted the projects failure in no small part because he wanted to throw himself into writing something closer to his heart: a series of reminiscences of the great poets he had known in his youth. Those pieces became the foundation of the book in your hands.

Halls reminiscences of T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas were first published as Remembering Poets in 1978 . Writing in the New York Times, the critic Hilton Kramer called the book beautifully frank and delicate, and sometimes quite funny. He added that he was certain it will be read and savored for a long time to come.

Decades later, Hall was invited to reprint the collection. But a simple reprint wasnt enough for him: He was an infamous tinkerer. Throughout his life, Hall wrote and rewrote his poetry and prose exhaustively, starting each new draft afresh in longhand on pale yellow legal pads. The publication of a finished piece was never terminal to his creative processin fact, Hall was known to mark up pages while he read live to an audience, unable to fight the urge to strike a comma here or add a dash there.

When it came to tinkering with Remembering Poets, Hall could not resist. Hed continued to read and think about the four poets hed written about in the 1970 s. So, he set to revising the entire book: he changed wordsreplacing prone with supine in a description of Poundand phrases; he wrote entire passages; and he added two entirely new sections, one on Marianne Moore and another that combined Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters. In 1992 , Remembering Poets was published under the new title Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, after a line by Yeats.

Now, nearly thirty years later, this edition takes the title Old Poets, as that was the title Donald Hall considered in the early 1970 s when he first dreamt up this collection of reminiscences and opinions.

Joshua Bodwell
Boston, Massachusetts

W hen I met Donald Hall in 1976 , I knew little about his poetry. Id seen his photograph on the front of the