The Fading Smile
Poets in Boston, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath,
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"A beautiful and richly instructive book, a worthy and welcome sequel to Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth."
Louis S. Auchincloss
An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all, of the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston through the half-decade beginning in 1955. That was the year Peter Davison, coming to Boston as a book editor. was swept up in a world -- in a tumult -- of poetry. He rediscovered his father's old friend Robert Frost. He briefly squired Sylvia Plath. He came to know Robert Lowell (whose poems and private disasters dominated the period) and Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur. Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, and others who, closely bound together in friendship or rivalry or both, defined the shape of American poetry at mid-century Through their eves as well as his own, and often in their words, Davison presents a sharply fresh vision of the shift from confidence to a troubled questioning that overtook America -- a transformation that was, in a sense, foreshadowed in the sensibilities, in the writings, sometimes in the lives, of some of our finest poets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
``There's a strange fact about the poets of roughly our age, and one that doesn't exactly seem to have always been true,'' observed Robert Lowell in a letter to Theodore Roethke in 1963. ``It's this, that to write we seem to have to go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning.'' In this memoir, poet and Houghton Mifflin editor Davison traces the connections that linked a large, dynamic and, at times, self-destructive group of American poets--Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath among them--for five years as Boston experienced its ``second poetic renaissance.'' Separate chapters discuss individual poets, and the author writes evocatively, too, of his own strivings during that same period in the Boston area. But the main interest of the book is the way Davison follows the writers' complex interrelations, fostered by teachers (John Holmes), institutions (the Poets' Theatre of Cambridge), proximity, choice and chance. This is a personal and vivid portrait of a literary moment and its community. Photos not seen by PW.
