by Roger Gilbert

My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, Robert Bly
White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006, Donald Hall

from Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2008.  Part II of this review will appear in the Summer 2008 issue.

We stand at the threshold of a Golden Age of octogenarian poetry. Even if we make allowances for changing life spans, such poetry was extremely scarce before the twentieth century. Few of the great poets who survived to old age produced enduring work in the latter part of their lives. Hugo and Goethe are the most prominent nineteenth-century exceptions, while Wordsworth remains the classic example of poetic dotage. Thomas Hardy may be the first instance in English of a poet writing at the peak of his powers in his ninth decade. Yeats and Stevens also belong to the elite group of long-lived poets whose very late poems are among their best. But the twentieth century is littered with poets who could not sustain their gifts into their last years—Frost, Pound, Eliot, Moore, Auden, to name just a few. All that seems to be changing now, to judge from the remarkable productivity of our senior bards. Poets as different as Richard Wilbur, Hayden Carruth, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti have continued to publish well into their eighties, and we're fortunate to have at least one poet among us still writing magnificently in her nineties, the incomparable Ruth Stone. Recently two fine poets, Carl Rakosi and Stanley Kunitz, even passed their hundredth birthdays, though sadly neither produced any poems during their second century. Then there's what we might call the Grandma Moses syndrome: within the last fifteen years three women, Virginia Hamilton Adair, Anne Porter, and the painter Dorothea Tanning, all published exceptional first books after the age of eighty.

But now the floodgates are about to open wide, as the extraordinarily rich generation of American poets born between 1925 and 1930 reaches the eighty-year milestone. Many significant members of this group are already dead, of course, some early—Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Frank O'Hara, James Wright—and some more recently—James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg, A. R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Donald Justice, Kenneth Koch. But many major figures continue to thrive, including Maxine Kumin, W. D. Snodgrass, Gerald Stern, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Maya Angelou, Donald Hall, Philip Levine, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, and Gary Snyder. If eighty is in fact the new sixty, as we're often told, then there's no reason to expect any of these poets suddenly to begin writing poems of extreme senescence. Unlike Eliot, who seemed eager to assume the perspective of old age long before he had actually arrived at it, most of the poets of this generation resist playing the role of Gerontion or Tiresias, preferring a more open, provisional stance to one of achieved wisdom. Ashbery provides what might serve as a motto for his whole generation in his famous poem "Soonest Mended": "probably thinking not to grow up / Is the brightest kind of maturity for us." Still, the next two decades are likely to see an unprecedented rush of poetry devoted to the trials and epiphanies of aging, as many poets enter their eighties and nineties with all their faculties intact.

Within this distinguished cohort, the four poets under review have achieved particular prominence. John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and Adrienne Rich may seem like an oddly matched quartet, yet while their styles and commitments differ in fundamental ways, all four of them enjoy the closest thing to stardom that our culture affords its poets. They also share another distinction: all four attended Harvard University in the late forties. The roll of major poets who passed through Cambridge is much longer, of course, and includes such luminaries as Emerson, Robinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Aiken, cummings, Kunitz, Olson, Lowell, and Nemerov. While other American colleges and universities can also claim many distinguished poets as alumni, none of them comes anywhere close to Harvard's astounding record in this area.(1) Even with its rich history, though, the five years just after World War II were an unusually heady time for poetry at Harvard. In addition to Bly, Ashbery, Hall, and Rich, the university numbered Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, L. E. Sissman, Peter Davison, and Kenward Elmslie among its undergraduates; Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, and Delmore Schwartz were all young instructors.

The epicenter of the poetry scene was the Harvard Advocate, the most storied of undergraduate literary magazines. Bly and Hall both served as the Advocate's "Pegasus" or literary editor; Ashbery was elected to the board, despite some resistance based on his homosexuality (one of the magazine's benefactors apparently wanted to quash its reputation as a haven for gay students). As a Radcliffe woman Rich was not eligible to work at the Advocate, but she published several poems in it. Despite their differences in age—Bly was born in 1926, Ashbery in 1927, Hall in 1928, and Rich in 1929, trivial differences from the perspective of old age, but not so trivial for undergraduates—the four poets spent much time together, working on the magazine, haunting the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, drinking beer and martinis with visiting dignitaries like Eliot, Auden, and Dylan Thomas, and reciting their poems to one another. Hall even remembers dating Rich briefly, though he gives Bly the credit for "discovering" her at a party. Many students, including Bly, Koch, and O'Hara, were returning veterans, a fact that had a far-reaching effect on the tone of undergraduate life. Not only were they older and worldlier than typical college students, they carried the swagger of having defeated fascism. Hall suggests that his was "the first literary generation in America for whom envy of Europe was not a problem," presumably because so much of it was in ruins. Add to this generational cockiness the special sense of privilege associated with being at Harvard, along with the even greater prestige of working on the Advocate, where literary gods had trodden, and it's little wonder that these fledgling poets felt themselves fully up to the task of transforming contemporary poetry.

That art must have seemed, if not moribund, at least languishing in the late forties. The innovative ferment of the teens and twenties had long since subsided, as had the political fervor of thirties poetry. Yeats was gone but still cast a giant shadow; Pound, Eliot, and Frost remained figures of veneration, though their best work was behind them. Stevens, Moore, and Williams seemed nearer, offering more useful models for the postwar generation. The most exciting presence for many young poets was W. H. Auden, who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1939 and quickly established himself as the leading successor to the great modernists. Dylan Thomas was also making a splash, though his drunkenness and lechery didn't endear him to the Advocate crowd when they gave him a party. Bly and Hall recall that two books by their immediate elders had a huge impact on them, Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and Richard Wilbur's The Beautiful Changes (1947). Both books exhibited the formal mastery in vogue at the time yet differed utterly in tone and temperament, Lowell's verse tortured and dense with foreboding, Wilbur's all urbanity and elegance. Berryman, Schwartz, Jarrell, Bishop, and Karl Shapiro were also publishing tightly crafted poems, along with a flock of now forgotten figures who nevertheless caught the attention of undergraduates; recently Ashbery has made a special cause of reviving minor forties poets like Joan Murray, Jean Garrigue, and David Schubert.

Yet despite the enormous skill on display in the poetry of this period, much of it gives off a palpable sense of constriction that would soon begin to loosen and dissolve. I don't want to rehearse yet again the familiar (and usually oversimplified) story of how American poetry broke free from the strictures of the New Criticism in the fifties and sixties. My narrower interest here is in the diverging paths taken by Ashbery, Bly, Hall, and Rich after they left Harvard. Each had a role to play in the revolution, but their individual contributions were quite distinct. Looking back over these four poets' careers while contemplating their profoundly different sensibilities, it's sometimes hard to believe that they all lived on the same planet, let alone that they were once boon companions. In this respect they might serve as a synecdoche for their poetic generation, encapsulating the aesthetic and intellectual diversity that makes the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century at once so vibrant and so difficult to map. Various affinities and alliances among the four poets appear, but don't form a consistent pattern. Hall and Bly have remained close friends who read and comment on one another's poems regularly, yet their styles only occasionally converge. Bly and Ashbery both take a strong interest in non-English poetry, but there's almost no overlap among the poets each has praised and translated. Rich and Hall frequently write about their personal lives, while Bly and Ashbery rarely do. Bly and Rich have written fiercely political poems on the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, among other topics; Hall and Ashbery generally eschew politics in their work. What all four poets share is an extraordinary resilience, a trait that has enabled each of them to go on trying new things rather than repeating a single successful formula. Where many writers develop a kind of imaginative calcification or hardening of the creative faculties in later life, Bly, Hall, Ashbery, and Rich are still in the process of remaking themselves and their art, as their most recent collections eloquently attest.

In 1949 the following poem appeared in the Harvard Advocate under the name Robert E. Bly:

LETTER FROM A WEDDING TRIP

Travelling south, leaves overflow the farms.
Day by day we watched the leaves increase
And the trees lie tangled in each other's arms.
Still generation, and calls that never cease
And rustlings in the brush; yesterday
She asked how long we have been on the way.
So in the afternoon we changed our route
And came down to the coast; everywhere
The same: fish, and the lobster's sensual eyes.
The natives sang for harvest, gave us fruit,
At night the monkeys sat beneath the trees.
All night the cries of dancers filled the air
And last year's virgins pressed into the leaves.
Sometimes I think of your land, cold and fresh,
And try to think: what was the month we quit
Our northern land that seemed inhabited
By more than reproduction of the flesh?
I wonder, watching how the branches interknit
If monkeys gibbered by our bridal bed.

Yeats is the obvious source here, in particular the first stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium," with its portrait of biology run amok. Stevens's depiction of Florida as a place of oppressive fecundity also reverberates in the background, while the poem's tonality owes something to early Lowell, especially the dry epistolary style of poems like "After the Surprising Conversions." (In an interview, Bly claims that Williams was the poet who meant the most to him at Harvard, and even recalls hitchhiking to Paterson to meet him. Without doubting Bly's memory, I can see no trace of Williams's influence in his early poems; that would come later.) Hall remembers Bly at Harvard as "incredibly skinny," wearing a three-piece suit and horn-rimmed glasses. A recent transfer from St. Olaf's College in Minnesota, the young Lutheran may well have felt some of the revulsion at the "reproduction of the flesh" voiced in this poem. A few years later, however, Bly sought to distance himself from those sentiments: when the poem was reprinted in the 1957 anthology New Poets of England and America, coedited by Hall, he retitled it "The Puritan on his Honeymoon." We might take that small revision as Bly's first step on his path toward the condition he later came to call "wildness."

Unlike his Harvard classmates Hall, Ashbery, and Rich, Bly didn't publish a book of poems in the fifties, but he did write more iambic verse, most of it similarly derivative, with here and there flashes of the spare power that would eventually become his hallmark. After spending three largely solitary years in New York City and two at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Bly married and moved to a small farm in Minnesota, where he founded the magazine that would provide the main outlet for his polemical energies over the next twenty years, The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies). There he published a series of influential essays condemning the complacency and insularity of American poetry, and praising poets like Lorca, Neruda, Rilke, Trakl, and Tranströmer for giving freer rein to the unconscious. Under the pseudonym "Crunk" he also printed scathing reviews of established poets while promoting the work of friends like William Stafford, Louis Simpson, Galway Kinnell, and James Wright, who together with Bly came to be known as the Deep Image school of poets. Bly's 1963 book Silence in the Snowy Fields established the key elements of the Deep Image style: free verse, stark diction, simple syntax, rural landscapes, and intense moments of feeling and intuition whose cause and content usually remain obscure. Coming after the highly worked, heavily discursive poetry that predominated in the 1950s, Bly's poems must have seemed wonderfully transparent and evocative. "Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River" is a good example of this mode at its most effective:

Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge,
And water kneeling in the moonlight.
In small towns the houses are built right on the ground;
The lamplight falls on all fours in the grass.
When I reach the river, the full moon covers it;
A few people are talking low in a boat.

In essays, interviews, and lectures Bly has put forward a series of terms and phrases to account for the kind of power he seeks in poetry: "inwardness," "leaping" images, "two-fold consciousness," "the human shadow," among others. His insistence on the centrality of the unconscious to the poetic process may keep us from noticing how much Bly's own poems depend for their effects on very precise turns of language. Internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance and loose meter give this passage its distinct musicality, while a subtle figurative wit governs phrases like "water kneeling in the moonlight" and "The lamplight falls on all fours in the grass." In both cases the verb carries the metaphor, creating a vague but haunting sense of immanence, of life pulsing everywhere in the inanimate world.

Bly went on to write in several other modes, including ferocious jeremiads and meditative prose poems, but the mildly surreal Midwestern pastorals of Silence in the Snowy Fields remain his most characteristic and beloved poems. In recent years his greatest fame has come not as a poet, but as a leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, a program that draws on Jungian thought to celebrate primordial masculinity. In the wake of his 1990 bestseller Iron John, an extended commentary on a Grimm folk tale that exemplifies the movement's basic principles, Bly has become something of a New Age rock star, leading workshops and retreats and issuing dire pronouncements on the sorry state of the male psyche. In this role, as in many others, he has made himself an easy target for critique and parody. As a polemicist Bly's tone tends to be self-satisfied and magisterial, though to his credit he does occasionally acknowledge flaws in his own thinking. As a poet his greatest vulnerability has been his reliance on a handful of tried-and-true formulae, talismanic words and gestures. Even at their most successful, Bly's poems can feel a bit like magic tricks, creating fleeting illusions of depth and mystery with a few deft sleights of the pen. Despite his penchant for theorizing, his poems often seem intellectually thin, unwilling to pursue thoughts beyond their initial form. This reluctance to elaborate and qualify is reflected in Bly's nearly phobic avoidance of subordinate clauses.

All these traits are present in Bly's latest collection, My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy; yet this book and its immediate predecessor, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, represent a significant departure for Bly. Each volume consists of forty-eight ghazals, the Urdu poetic form that has gained wide currency in English in recent years. Like the sonnet, the ghazal started out as an erotic form, but in the hands of masters like Hafez and Ghalib (both of whom Bly has translated) it can become a vehicle for a broad range of religious and secular themes. A sequence of unrhymed, syntactically complete strophes whose interrelations are often elusive, the form demands the kind of associative leaps between images or thoughts that Bly has long championed, yet it also generates subtle patterns of coherence and closure. Bly's primary modification to the form is the substitution of tercets for the traditional couplets; in an interview he explained that this allows him to approximate the 36-syllable count of the Urdu stanza while working in a line more conducive to English speech rhythms. Bly also selectively adopts two other traditional features of the form: the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of each stanza, a device that appears in six of the forty-eight poems in the new book, and the inclusion of an address to the poet by name in the final stanza, which occurs in sixteen poems.

It must be said that My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy does not make a particularly good first impression. From the cloying Monet haystack and greeting-card font on the cover to the cheap paper with poems printed on one side only, the book looks like a patent attempt to cash in on Bly's New Age celebrity. But whoever the intended buyer is, the poems themselves are superb, quite possibly the best of Bly's career. Writing ghazals seems to have freed his imagination from its old constraints, many of which he had previously touted as virtues. The austere, wintry poetry of Silence in the Snowy Fields and its successors has given way to a late poetry of summer, of abundance and harvest. Where the earlier poems were nearly ascetic in their focus on stark landscapes and their exclusion of cultural references, the ghazals teem with proper names, mostly of writers, artists, and musicians. A man of enormous erudition and appetite, Bly has finally learned how to put everything he knows and loves into his poetry; the book is a densely woven tapestry of allusions, tributes, and homages to figures from Swift and Tolstoy to Shabistari and Rumi. Having recently published The Winged Energy of Delight, a selection of his translations from twenty-two poets, Bly evidently had all their voices reverberating in his memory as he wrote, along with those of many British and American poets he reveres. If solitude and silence were the keynotes of Bly's early work, these new poems are crowded with friends and raucous with cries and song.

Despite his frequent claims that the unconscious is the only true source of poetic material, Bly is refreshingly forthright in acknowledging his new book's indebtedness to the past. In one poem he declares "My genius amounts to persistence in following / Elephants through the wind," which can be taken as a reflection on his stubborn pursuit of the great writers who precede him. Later in the same poem he adds

I don't know if you've heard the buff-chested grouse
When he drums on an old log. He is like Hafez
Repeating something he has heard from his teacher.

If even Hafez, the fourteenth-century master of the ghazal, sometimes quotes his teacher, then Bly need make no apology for his own echoing of beloved precursors. The final poem of the book, "Stealing Sugar from the Castle," is more candid still in its endorsement of Eliot's maxim that "immature poets imitate, mature poets steal":

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.
Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

"Stealing sugar from the castle" is Bly's whimsical phrase for borrowing bits of sweetness from all the great poetry he's read and translated. Among the poets he names in the book are the troubadour Jaures Rudel, the Sufi poet Abu Said, Marvell, Eliot, Akhmatova, and Neruda, but many others contribute their grains of sugar as well, including the Beowulf poet, Blake, Whitman, Yeats, Lorca, and Stevens. Sometimes an unnamed poet may lie hidden behind a named one; "A Poem for Andrew Marvell" pays a subtle tribute to Bly's old Harvard teacher and sometime adversary Archibald MacLeish, author of "You, Andrew Marvell." Novelists like Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Melville, and Fitzgerald also turn up, but the book's main narrative source is the Bible, especially the Old Testament; Adam, Joseph, Jacob, Rachel, and Samson all appear alongside lesser figures like Jethro and Tobit. Painters summoned include Giotto, Rembrandt, Cezanne, and Robert Motherwell, whose great "Elegies" for the Spanish Republic furnish the subject of a powerful poem. Musicians are an even more constant presence, perhaps because the ghazal is traditionally sung. Bly reports writing many of the poems while listening to music, and his references range from Bach and Rameau to the Kurdish singer Shahram Nazeri (he apparently has no use for jazz, rock, or country). In an interview Bly calls My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy a book of culture rather than, like Silence in the Snowy Fields, a book of nature, yet even this doesn't quite do justice to the range of these poems, which contain buff-chested grouse, badgers, jellyfish, and calendar oaks along with poets, painters, and musicians. (The one truly incongruous reference in the book is to the Cirque de Soleil, which feels less like an allusion than a product placement.)

The book's greatest strength resides not in its allusive range, however, but in the ghazal form itself, which Bly handles with enormous assurance. In this respect the book marks a distinct advance on Bly's first collection of ghazals, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars. The earlier volume's poems are often a bit muddy, with so many arresting phrases and images jammed together that the underlying design is lost. The poems in the later book are more spacious and lucid, each stanza performing one clear gesture that finds its place within a larger dance. Here is "The Pistachio Nut":

God crouches at night over a single pistachio.
The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming
Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child.

Haydn tells us that we've inherited a mansion
On one of the Georgia sea islands. Then the last
Note burns down the courthouse and all the records.

Everyone who presses down the strings with his own fingers
Is on his way to Heaven; the pain in the fingertips
Goes toward healing the crimes the hands have done.

Let's give up the notion that great music is a way
Of praising human beings. It's good to agree that one drop
Of ocean water holds all of Kierkegaard's prayers.

When I hear the sitar give out the story of its life,
I know it is telling me how to behave—while kissing
The dear one's feet, to weep over my wasted life.

Robert, this poem will soon be over; and you
Are like a twig trembling on the lip of the falls.
Like a note of music, you are about to become nothing.

The image of God crouching over a pistachio has a distinctly Persian flavor, but the first stanza takes its sublime tone from Whitman, who loved to affirm the equal glory of great and small things. The second stanza picks up the geographical specificity of the first, now in a more playful vein; Bly's comically literal interpretation of Haydn is a wonderful comment on how music promises riches that never materialize. The next three stanzas continue to reflect on the varied powers of music to heal, praise, and instruct. The last offers the ghazal's traditional address to the poet, spoken in a sterner voice, and fusing the themes of natural minutiae and music to evoke a transience that will momentarily engulf both poem and poet. Throughout we feel a tension between imaginative fluidity and formal containment that gets beautifully resolved in the final line, as form and vision melt together in a moment of pure closure.

A strict form like the ghazal demands a high degree of workmanship at odds with rapid composition; Bly claims the book took him four years to write, a rate of just one poem per month. (This stands in sharp contrast to Bly's 1997 book Morning Poems, in which he emulated William Stafford's practice of writing a new poem every day; ironically that volume seems to have laid the ground for the ghazals by helping Bly overcome his built-in filtering mechanisms and open himself to new possibilities in style and subject matter.) Although the ghazal traditionally has a varying number of strophes, Bly chooses to heighten its formal symmetry by giving all his poems six stanzas, thus bringing them closer to fixed European forms like the sonnet and sestina. The same concern for symmetry appears in his division of the book into six sections of eight poems. Such patterning operates at the level of rhythm as well; the title of My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy is a perfect iambic pentameter line, by no means the only one in the book. Bly's newfound traditionalism is visible in even smaller ways; he's the only contemporary poet I know who's gone back to capitalizing every line, a device he had abandoned in the sixties along with almost every other poet of his generation.

All these formal components combine to give the book great cumulative power. Just as the individual stanzas in each ghazal function as self-contained utterances while forming emotional and thematic constellations, Bly's ghazals themselves cohere into larger movements. As a result the book feels less like a collection of separate poems than a lyric sequence, intricately stitched together by recurring words, phrases, and images. A whole line appears twice, "The potato field belongs to early night," reinforced by several other references to potatoes. The phrase "It's all right" recurs as well, repeated anaphorically at the beginnings of lines in two poems. Other repeated elements include images of perching on top of a pole and driving a wagon across a prairie. Horses and crows are ubiquitous. Perhaps the book's signature image is the drop of water, usually holding something incongruously vast; versions of this trope occur in "The Pistachio Nut" ("one drop / Of ocean water holds all of Kierkegaard's prayers"), and in the title "Hiding in a Drop of Water." Some recurring features belong to the more bombastic phase of Bly's rhetoric; he has always relied inordinately on the pronoun "we" and the contraction "let's," just as he has long seemed intent on surpassing William Carlos Williams in the over-liberal use of exclamation points. (Thankfully in this book he cuts back sharply on the irritating vocative "Friends," which marred much of The Night Abraham Called to the Stars.) Open-ended superlatives like "so many" and "such" are everywhere, together with old Bly favorites like "dark," "body," and "joyful." By my count the word "thousand" occurs in at least twelve poems, each time imparting a quick dose of sublimity by marking a temporal order beyond the individual life span. Yet where such tics often made Bly's earlier work seem formulaic, here they're skillfully woven into the book's varied and inventive texture.

The ghazal's strophic form also allows Bly to modulate easily between very different moods and tones. There are surprising moments of humor, never a prominent element in Bly's earlier work:

Amazing things do happen. One morning Kierkegaard
Explains exactly what ressentiment is
And the mouse agrees to marry everyone in the room.

There are also several poems voicing rage and horror at the war in Iraq, some of which previously appeared in Bly's 2003 chapbook The Insanity of Empire. The most direct of these is "Call and Answer" ("Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days / And cry over what is happening"), but a more oblique poem called "The Blinding of Samson" is sharper in its urgency:

Don't you see them? They are coming to blind Samson!
But some of us don't want the day to end!
If Samson goes blind, what will happen to the sea?

A number of poems allude to more private traumas as well, like the beautiful "What to Do with the Garden," which ends with the admonition "Robert, give up your longing for a different childhood." Bly recently told one interviewer that the ghazal form "gives me permission to dip into little sorrows of my own life. Because you can do something else, 36 syllables later, you know?" The phrase "dip into" is telling, for while the book repeatedly touches on grief and anxiety, its ground tone remains, as its title suggests, celebratory. Bly's expressions of delight, gratitude, and joy feel more authentic than his expressions of pain and grief, which often seem a bit theatrical ("I cannot stop weeping over the thousand nights / When I was unable to weep"; "Hunter, bring me my horse. I am going into sorrow again"). Perhaps this is because Bly is essentially a religious poet, possessed of a deep serenity that belies his insistence on sorrow. In the book's final poem he speaks of his own impending death with disarming candor:

I don't mind your saying that I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

Joy literally gets the last word in My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy; the title is also the book's closing line. As a reader I'm immensely grateful to find a book that speaks so infectiously of joy, an emotion that's hard to come by in contemporary poetry. But Bly's gift is also a limitation. For poems that confront the bitterest of human experiences with total fidelity, we must look elsewhere.

Of the several poems Donald Hall published in the Harvard Advocate, the only one he included in his first book is called "Wedding Party":

The pock-marked player of the accordion
Empties and fills his squeeze box in the corner,
Kin to the tiny man who pours champagne,
Kin to the caterer. These solemn men
Among the sounds of silk and popping corks
Stand like pillars. Here the white bride
Moves through the crowd as a chaired relic moves.

We are the guest invited yesterday,
Friend to the bride's rejected suitor, come
On sudden visit unexpectedly.
And so we chat, on best behavior, with
The Uncle, Aunt, and unattractive girl;
And watch the Summer twilight melt away
As thunder gathers head to end the day.

And then at once the pock-marked player grows
To dark magnificence beside the bride
Whose marriage fades, whose Cinderella gown
Becomes a smock to peel potatoes in.
And in the storm that hurls upon the room
She sees in a burst of lightning, clear, immense,
His box that empties, fills, empties, fills.

Weddings often followed hard on college in those years, so it should come as no surprise to find them figuring prominently in undergraduate poetry. Where Bly's "Letter from a Wedding Trip," published in the Advocate the same year, calls on a lush southern landscape to embody his newlyweds' repressed sexuality, Hall focuses on the ceremony and its dreary social appurtenances. Already we can hear the note of Hardyesque fatalism that will become a Hall specialty, together with a less appealing strain of contempt for hoi polloi that also returns intermittently. The speaker's aloof, sardonic tone is possibly to be understood as a function of his distance from the occasion, being merely "friend to the [...] rejected suitor," but this doesn't make any more palatable his evident delight at the prospect of the regal bride's demotion to housewife, her "Cinderella gown" become "a smock to peel potatoes in." (Hall later revised those lines to give them more empathy and amplitude; in White Apples and the Taste of Stone they read: "Whose marriage withers to a rind of years / And curling photographs in a dry box.") The poem saves itself from bile with its mock-epiphanic conclusion, in which the squeeze-box becomes a wry emblem of transience and renewal.

With its strongly metered, end-stopped lines, regular stanzas, formal diction, and pervasive irony, "Wedding Party" belongs squarely within the New Critical aesthetic of the forties and fifties. Soon after graduating from Harvard, Hall became one of his generation's most visible exponents of that aesthetic, an association that dogged him for many years afterward. In 1957, he coedited New Poets of England and America, a gathering of buttoned-down metrical verse that was quickly set against the more Bohemian, avant-garde 1959 anthology The New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen. A few years later Hall edited a much more eclectic anthology that included many of the figures from the Allen book—Ashbery, O'Hara, Ginsberg, Creeley—but by this time his image as a quintessentially academic poet had been fixed. Hall's early career certainly showed a strong disposition toward university life. After graduating from Harvard he spent two years at Oxford, where he edited a chapbook series and several journals while earning his B.Litt. This was followed by a year at Stanford, studying with Yvor Winters, then by three more years at Harvard as a member of the prestigious Society of Fellows, after which he took up a professorship at the University of Michigan. In many respects Hall's route reversed that of his close friend Robert Bly, who for the most part shunned the academy, preferring the anonymity of New York and the solitude of his Minnesota farm. Unlike Bly, Hall began publishing early, bringing out his first book of poems in 1955 and his second in 1958, while also enjoying considerable success as an editor, journalist, anthologist, textbook author, essayist, and writer of children's books. By the early sixties he had established himself as an all-around man of letters, comfortably ensconced within the twin worlds of publishing and higher education. Then in 1975, in what might be seen as a delayed emulation of Bly, Hall gave up his tenured job at Michigan and moved to his grandparents' farmhouse at Eagle Pond in New Hampshire, where he still lives. There his poetry came into its own, steadily gaining strength and depth over the next three decades.

The story of Hall's gradual development from skilled craftsman to stirring poet is on display in his most recent book, White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006. At 430 pages, this is an unusually generous selection—too generous, according to at least one reviewer. (The CD included with the book offers a more judicious sampling of Hall's poetry.) But while it's true that the book contains some mediocre work, a collection like this deserves to be judged not simply as an aggregate of individual poems, but as the record of a poet's lifelong courtship of the muse, with all its ups and downs. Perhaps Hall's greatest liability has been his lack of a consistent style or distinctive voice. Unlike many poets of his generation, his poems have no features that mark them as unmistakably his. It's possible to take this lack as a sign of virtue, to praise Hall for abjuring the kind of gimmicks that can serve as mere tokens of originality. Yet it must be said that Hall often seems a kind of poetic chameleon, taking on the styles of many other poets, from revered elders to admired peers. In interviews Hall has spoken of his reliance on a small circle of friends for readings and advice; at various times these have included Bly, Rich, W. D. Snodgrass, Louis Simpson, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Thom Gunn, Wendell Berry, Frank Bidart, Greg Orr, Robert Pinsky, Liam Rector, and Jane Kenyon, all of whom have left their impress on Hall's work. Hall's wonderful memoir Their Ancient Glittering Eyes describes his close encounters with older poets, several of whom—Frost, Eliot, Pound, Winters, Moore—are also audible in his poems. More remote ancestral presences appear there as well, sometimes overtly imitated, sometimes more subtly evoked: Horace, Keats, Whitman, Yeats, Hardy, Lawrence, among others. (Unlike Bly, Hall only occasionally looks outside the Anglo-American tradition.) The sheer variety of Hall's influences testifies to his eclectic tastes and assimilative pen; rather than struggling with a single hulking precursor, his oeuvre plays genial host to a crowd of fellow poets, each of whom adds a particular note or flavor to the mix.

Hall's poetry is distinguished less by originality of style than by its characteristic tone of tragic stoicism. Here too he is Bly's antithesis. Bly often speaks of grief but seems temperamentally disposed toward joy; Hall pays lip service to joy but is most compelling when he writes of grief. He offers a short discourse on the relative weight of these affects in a mordant poem called "Tubes":

When a long-desired
baby is born, what joy!
More happiness
than we find in sex,
more than we take in
success, revenge, or
wealth. But should the same
infant die, would you
measure the horror
on the same rule? Grief
weighs down the seesaw;
joy cannot budge it.

Hall wrote these lines before suffering the greatest bereavement of his life, the death from leukemia of his wife, Jane Kenyon, which gave devastating proof of the last proposition. Hall has always been an elegiac poet, composing dirges early in his career for his father (one provides the book's title) and his grandfather, along with a slew of more general meditations on mortality. Pace "Tubes," even the birth of Hall's first child became the occasion for a memento mori; the most anthologized of his early poems is called "My Son, My Executioner." Not Surprisingly, death becomes increasingly prominent in Hall's later work. "Another Elegy" memorializes the fictional poet William Trout, a parodic composite of Hall's generation, while "Praise for Death" is a powerfully ambivalent litany mingling bitterness and affirmation. Throughout these poems death remains more theme than fact, a terrifying abstraction rather than an intimate companion. With Kenyon's death in 1995 Hall became a full-time elegist, arguably the most moving of his generation. It's difficult to speak tactfully of how his poetry benefited from this tragedy; suffice it to say that few poets have explored the myriad shades and phases of grieving as deeply and vividly as Hall in his recent work.

While it gives an especially full representation of Hall's poems about Jane Kenyon, White Apples and the Taste of Stone also charts the weaving itinerary his poetry took before her death. The book offers something of a primer in changing verse fashions, as we watch Hall move from hard-edged formalism in the fifties to mildly surreal free verse in the sixties to long-lined descriptive poems in the seventies. After settling at Eagle Pond with Kenyon in 1975, Hall began to anchor his work in the landscape and culture of rural New Hampshire. One series of poems explores the circular rhythms of birth, labor, and death as embodied in particular objects and animals—leaves, sheep, horses, cows, chickens, stone walls—while another tells stories of quiet desperation among ordinary working people. Then in 1988 Hall published his book-length poem The One Day, which many hailed as a breakthrough work. A sustained blast of prophetic fury and satirical spleen, the poem had been gestating since the early seventies, at the end of a dark period of drink and depression. In a memoir Hall recalls being subject to "attacks of language," during which he rapidly scribbled pages of free verse as though taking dictation. Eventually he recast this material in ten-line stanzas and imposed a firm thematic structure on its turbulent contents, which include intertwining dramatic monologues, neoclassical pastiches, and wild concatenations of particulars. The Waste Land can often be heard in the background, but Hall brings the poem's first-person voice forward, amplifying its notes of rage and despair before making a tentative turn toward acceptance in the final section.

At the heart of the poem are two tropes that have proven central to Hall's later work. In an earlier poem called "Kicking the Leaves" Hall spoke of "building / the house of dying," and the phrase evidently took root in his imagination. In The One Day it becomes a major leitmotif, from the opening lines in which the speaker daydreams "to build the house of dying," to the middle section's apocalyptic vision of houses burnt or struck down, to the final oracular decree "Work, love, build a house, and die," where the addition of work and love reflect the poem's modulation from anguish to resolve. The second key trope also has its origin in an earlier poem, "Great Day in the Cows' House." There Hall speaks of "the great day / that cancels the successiveness of creatures," and this idea of a single transcendent day that gathers up all particular days becomes the chief principle of solace in The One Day, expressed in a series of lyrically cadenced apothegms scattered throughout the poem's last section:

The one day stands unmoving in sun and shadow.
...
From the first orchard to the last is one day and forever.
...
The one day clarifies and stays only when days depart.
...
Here among the thirty thousand days of a long life,
a single day stands still:
...
                          We are one cell perpetually
dying and being born, led by a single day that presides
over our passage through the thirty thousand days
from highchair past work and love to suffering death.

Together the tropes of the house and the day help Hall to organize the intricate play of particulars and universals that animates The One Day.

Despite his strenuous efforts at affirmation, Hall is at bottom a poet of complaint, in both large and small senses. (A recent poem ventriloquizes a disgruntled reader, asking "Will Hall ever write lines / that do anything but / whine and complain?") At times The One Day suffers from an odd conjunction of Old Testament rage and trivial annoyance, as though its speaker were the love child of Ezekiel and Andy Rooney. The curmudgeonly note returns in Hall's next book, The Museum of Clear Ideas, especially in a series of poems modeled on Horace's odes that address many of Hall's pet peeves, e.g., poetry workshops and New Age fads. In these and in a long poem called "Baseball," written under the influence of his friend and fellow Yvor Winters student Robert Pinsky, Hall trades the visionary intensity of The One Day for a more prosy, discursive style. Another sequence, "The Old Life," renders autobiographical anecdotes in loose syllabic verse, including reminiscences of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Henry Moore that Hall had previously recounted in prose. Over the years Hall has penned hundreds of essays, memoirs, and articles on topics ranging from sports to poetry to Eagle Pond, but in the period after The One Day his prose seemed to invade his verse, draining away much of its music and vigor.

Then in 1995 Jane Kenyon died, and Hall's poetry was again transformed. The spate of elegies that followed brought an unprecedented candor to the poetry of grieving, winning Hall much praise and a greatly expanded audience. One question inevitably raised by these poems, as by other accounts of traumatic experience, is how much of their power stems from verbal artistry and how much from the inherent pathos of the events they describe. In fact the ratio varies significantly from poem to poem. For White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Hall has slightly rearranged the poems that appeared in his celebrated collection Without and its successor The Painted Bed, grouping them into three sections entitled "All," "Letters without Addresses," and "Throwing Away." The first section contains two sequences, "Her Illness" and "After Life," that use third-person pronouns and clipped syntax to recite the facts of Kenyon's sickness, death, and burial with a kind of numb detachment. More poignant is the series of verse letters that Hall wrote to Kenyon at intervals during the year after her death, which tenderly rehearse the couple's daily routines of work and love. Their intimacy of address allows for a more fluid tone that encompasses nostalgia, self-pity, despair, even bitter humor:

Sometimes I weep for an hour
twisted in the fetal position
as you did in depression.
Hypochondriac, I fret over Gus
and decide he's got diabetes.
In daydream I spend afternoons
digging around your peonies
to feed them my grandfather's
fifty-year-old cow manure.
Next week maybe I'll menstruate.

(Gus, it should be noted, is a dog, and plays a major role in these poems.) An especially notable feature of Hall's elegies is their forthrightness in contemplating the tangled nexus of grief and sexual desire. One letter poem ends with Hall at the kitchen sink, where his wife used to stand, pathetically pressing his penis into "zinc and butcherblock"; in another he tells her "I want to fuck you in paradise." A poem called "Ardor" regards the widower's sexual frenzy and grimly concludes "Lust is grief / that has turned over in bed / to look the other way." Hall follows the letter poems with a series of elegantly shaped lyrics modeled on Hardy's elegies for his dead wife, like the gorgeous "Summer Kitchen":

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

"It's ready now. Come on," she said.
"You light the candle."
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.

The delicate counterpoint between prosody and syntax in these lines subtly imitates their deeper polyphony of grief and gratitude.

Two longer poems stand apart from the rest, forgoing quiet reflection in favor of a more extreme rhetoric. The unpunctuated litany "Without," originally written during Kenyon's illness and then recast in the past tense after her death, describes the couple's ordeal in purely privative terms, as a bleak island "without dog or semicolon or village square / without monkey or lily or garlic." Even more powerful is "Kill the Day," a dark palinode that revives the form and style of The One Day while emptying out its celebratory conclusion. Its revisionary drive shows itself most starkly in the transformation of the earlier poem's stern decree "Work, love, build a house, and die" into the more brutal "Sleep, rage, kill the day, and die." In this poem we approach the burning core of Hall's bereavement, unalloyed by reportage or the fiction of address. Its closing lines offer a final tragic synthesis of the tropes of house and day:

In the day's crush and tangle of melted nails,
collapsed foundation stones, and adze-trimmed beams,
the widower alone glimpsed the beekeeper's mask
in high summer as it approached the day they built,
now fallen apart with bark still on its beams,
nine layers of wallpaper over the dry laths—
always ending, no other ending, in dead eyes open.

In its unabashed rage and furious eloquence, "Kill the Day" may well be Hall's masterpiece, though it requires knowledge of The One Day for its full impact. The section of elegies for Kenyon closes with the sardonically titled "Affirmation," which announces "To grow old is to lose everything." More than most other poets of his generation, Hall writes candidly and unsentimentally of aging. A final slim group of new poems continues to brood over decline and loss, themes no longer confined to the death of a beloved. None of these achieves the intensity of Hall's best work, but together they bring the book to a fitting diminuendo.

Unlike Bly, Ashbery, and Rich, Hall has seldom been placed among the leading lights of his extraordinary generation. For better or worse, his work is rarely a subject of serious academic study, perhaps because it doesn't seem to pursue a consistent aesthetic or ideological "project." Even his recent stint as U.S. Poet Laureate is unlikely to elevate him to the first rank of contemporary poets; indeed for some it may confirm his standing as a popular bard in the same league as his predecessors Billy Collins and Ted Kooser, writing accessible poems that fail to expand or challenge the parameters of their art. But though White Apples and the Taste of Stone is an uneven book, it contains some masterful work that deserves to be read and reread by anyone who cares about poetry. What Hall lacks in originality, he nearly makes up for in diligence, craft, and wit. Poetry for him has always been a matter of work more than play; he's written forcefully about revision as prolonged labor that can and should take many years, and produced homilies in both prose and verse extolling work as a good in itself ("Work, love, build a house, and die"). His best poems emerge from the confluence of labor and suffering; in them we feel the presence of an urgency beyond the need to do a good job. Hall may lack the quirky charisma and sheer force of personality that have made his best friend Robert Bly and his old classmates John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich into living icons, but he has worked harder at his art, and the result is a body of poetry unsurpassed in its exploration of the shadowy continuum between despair and endurance.

About the Author
Roger Gilbert, a frequent contributor to MQR, teaches American poetry at Cornell University. His essays and reviews have appeared in Contemporary Literature, Southwest Review, Salmagundi, Parnassus, and other magazines. He is currently a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, where he is writing a critical biography of A. R. Ammons.

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