(Consider: 'There is a look of eyes fierce as a big Bethelem open/hearth furnace/or a little green-fire acetylene torch.') You have to wade through the earnestness, but those moments are there. Sandburg lumbers and sweeps, but he also pricks the eye with sharp bits of beauty and irony. Yet if Aiken is saying that Sandburg's work lacks a certain specificity or eye for freighted detail, I have to disagree. Sandburg's work, however, was not to Aiken's taste. This is a disingenuous statement by Aiken he had actually sought and been denied permission to re-publish the work of Pound and Masters. 'The work of these poets interests me in the mass, if I may put it so,' Aiken writes, 'but disappoints me in the item.' Edgar Lee Masters' from his collection, and blaming his 'own critical perversity' for their exclusion. Louis named Thomas Stearns 'T.S.' Eliot.Īiken's anthology is an idiosyncratic collection, choosing poems from only 15 poets, apologizing in his preface for 'the absence of Mr. Young Conrad discovered the bodies he was then spirited off to live with relatives in Massachusetts, who sent him to boarding school in Concord and then on to Harvard, where he became lifelong friends with a kid from St.

In 1927, the Modern Library produced 'An Anthology of Modern American Poetry,' which consisted of poems selected by the esteemed Conrad Aiken, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize and serve as United States Poet Laureate.Īiken was a young man then, and we might assume his particular strangeness might have had something to do with the fact that when he was 11 years old, his father, a prominent eye surgeon in Savannah, Ga., murdered his mother and immediately committed suicide.

It requires a kind of strangeness that most of us cannot - and might not want to - acquire. (We are not all created equal.) It is easy enough to scribble down thoughts and prayers, but not everyone can be a poet. There are books that claim 'anyone can sing.' (But no one has to listen.) We can all learn to write well enough, and maybe the largest part of learning to write well is wanting to write well.īut there are some things that require an innate ability. And we all can learn to do math - some of us just don't want to. Tone-deaf people can learn to play guitar and piano if they learn the math that undergirds music theory. Most people can learn to do most things adequately.īen Hogan believed that, given the right instruction and kind of practice, any able-bodied person could learn to play golf well enough to shoot in the 70s.

Emily wants to play online