World War II poet

[CMC]

Just saw this and thought you guys might be interested:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1494038,00.html

 

[Harp]

A posthumous recognition for Douglas; whom had he lived, might
have made his mark in English Literature. Perhaps this play will begin
the process of public discovery.

 

[Mahinatakataka]

Much more

Thanks for bringing poetry into the forum. I had the pleasure and the priviledge to meet Anthony Hecht and take a class with him before he passed two years ago.

His obituaries noted him as a 'WWII poet, a Jewish-American poet, a Formalist.' Of course he, like Douglas, and Sassoon and all who get inevitably lumped together in literature for one reason or another, was much more than this. Just as poets like Hecht and Douglas transmute and transcend even the darkest of human experiences, so does their work transect time and place to find us. And change us.

 

[Harp]

Thanks for bringing poetry into the forum. I had the pleasure and the priviledge to meet Anthony Hecht and take a class with him before he passed two years ago.

His obituaries noted him as a 'WWII poet, a Jewish-American poet, a Formalist.' Of course he, like Douglas, and Sassoon and all who get inevitably lumped together in literature for one reason or another, was much more than this. Just as poets like Hecht and Douglas transmute and transcend even the darkest of human experiences, so does their work transect time and place to find us. And change us.

Without doubt, Hecht belongs to history as much to poetry or literature,
with the double dactyl his signature. Poetry can drive home a point with
its poignancy and beauty that other literary forms lack; especially when
employed by a masterful and wise individual. The war poets demand to be studied.

--Where did you study under Hecht? Yale?

 

[TailendCharlie]

I am moved.

 

[Mahinatakataka]

Without doubt, Hecht belongs to history as much to poetry or literature,
with the double dactyl his signature. Poetry can drive home a point with
its poignancy and beauty that other literary forms lack; especially when
employed by a masterful and wise individual. The war poets demand to be studied.

--Where did you study under Hecht? Yale?

Oh, Harp, be still my heart. A kindred spirit...

I had a master class with Hecht at Johns Hopkins. One of my professors and my advisor was a student and friend of Hecht (who wrote the forward to his book of peotry).

WWII affected him profoundly. And like any good poet (or artist), he tells the truth but "slant," as Ms. Dickenson would advise. I think of poems like "The Book of Yorek" (perhaps the most successful sestina in the language), and the "Feast of Stephen," one of the most mesmerizing pieces of literature ever written. Both ease the reader into some comfortable sense of normalcy. And by the the time the reader realizes that the dark heart of genocide, war and human violence is being unvield in front of him, it's too late to turn back.

Hecht is "aquainted with the night" of human nature and like Dante, able to come back from the depth with images and words that haunt us.

And having met him a couple times in person (and appropriate to the Fedora), he was as "dapper" and distinguished looking in person as his elegant, rich voice would suggest.

Did you have the opportunity to study with him?

 

[Harp]

I never met Hecht, unfortunately. Had I been wiser, and not so
callous and insouciant in youth, I would have made it a point to
have enrolled somewhere under him. I will curse myself for this error
forever.... Poets, like Hecht and Keith Douglas, are never fully appreciated
in life, are they?

 

[Mahinatakataka]

You're Going to Miss Me When I'm Gone

I never met Hecht, unfortunately. Had I been wiser, and not so
callous and insouciant in youth, I would have made it a point to
have enrolled somewhere under him. I will curse myself for this error
forever.... Poets, like Hecht and Keith Douglas, are never fully appreciated
in life, are they?

So many truly great poets and artists die, as you suggest, uknown or unrecognized in their true light. I think of the work of one of my writing lodestones, Louise Bogan. She wrote some of the most brilliant, chilling and trenchant lines in the language, and yet her work is largely undiscovered by the public.

I don't know why some of the greats whom I'd admire achieved almost instant success, like Eliot, or lifelong cultdom, like Yeats, and others must wait for recognition after death.

 

[Harp]

So many truly great poets and artists die, as you suggest, uknown or unrecognized in their true light. I think of the work of one of my writing lodestones, Louise Bogan. She wrote some of the most brilliant, chilling and trenchant lines in the language, and yet her work is largely undiscovered by the public.

I don't know why some of the greats whom I'd admire achieved almost instant success, like Eliot, or lifelong cultdom, like Yeats, and others must wait for recognition after death.

Goddess be with me now,
commend my music to the woods.

Hecht, schooled to Mars; yet Solomonic in eros prose, temporal and
incandescent...his Gardens of the Villa D'Este is an oasis within
a parched desert. Yeats-an Irishman less the scoundrel that was Joyce,
but a poet laureate caught by caprice and fickle acclaim. Eliot, most
interesting and trenchant. To some extent, a poet must advertize oneself,
or cater to public recognition. Wilde is a case in point. Absolutely adore his
work, all of it, but not the man himself, too flawed. Hecht, noble in life
as in prose; others, Seeger, Douglas felled much too young, never allowed
to flower as poets. Anonymity cloaks most poetry. But to discover a
hidden treasure is priceless and perhaps poetry's chief reward.

 

[Harp]

WWII Poets

Where is the bard, whose soul can now
Its high presuming hopes avow?
Where he who thinks, with rapture blind,
This hallow'd work for him designed?

William Collins
Ode on the Poetical Character

 

[Harp]

Mahina:

Hecht reading at U of C, wish you had been there.

 

[John Boyer]

Desert Flowers

Living in a wide landscape are the flowers -
Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying -
the shell and the hawk every hour
are slaying men and jerboas, slaying
the mind: but the body can fill
the hungry flowers and the dogs who cry words
at nights, the most hostile things of all.
But that is not new. Each time the night discards
draperies on the eyes and leaves the mind awake
I look each side of the door of sleep
for the little coin it will take
to buy the secret I shall not keep.
I see men as trees suffering
or confound the detail and the horizon.
Lay the coin on my tongue and I will sing
of what the others never set eyes on.


--Keith Douglas

 

[John Boyer]

Simplify Me When I'm Dead

I was not familiar with the poet Keith Douglas until I stumbled upon this old thread. It is quite unfortunate to have lost such an understated poet as Keith Douglas during WWII.

One of my favorite anthologies is "The Lost Voices of World War I" by Tim Cross. I anxiously await a similar publication on the lost voices of World War II. Keith Douglas would certainly deserve prominant mention.

Simplify Me When I'm Dead

Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.

As the processes of earth
strip off the colour of the skin:
take the brown hair and blue eye

and leave me simpler than at birth,
when hairless I came howling in
as the moon entered the cold sky.

Of my skeleton perhaps,
so stripped, a learned man will say
"He was of such a type and intelligence," no more.

Thus when in a year collapse
particular memories, you may
deduce, from the long pain I bore

the opinions I held, who was my foe
and what I left, even my appearance
but incidents will be no guide.

Time's wrong-way telescope will show
a minute man ten years hence
and by distance simplified.

Through that lens see if I seem
substance or nothing: of the world
deserving mention or charitable oblivion,

not by momentary spleen
or love into decision hurled,
leisurely arrive at an opinion.

Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.


by Keith Douglas (1920-1944)

 

[John Boyer]

Soissons

...'A Laon, belle cathedrale', making
a wave of his white hat, explains
the maker of gargoyles. So we take
a route for Laon and Rheims leaving you
Soissons, a simplified medieval view
taken from a Book of Hours. How dark
seems the whole country we enter. Now it rains,
the trees like ominous old men are shaking.

From Soissons by
Keith Douglas (1920-1944)

 

[rogaleo]

If poets...

Then, though not from english-speaking country, you can't omit Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, a soldier of Warsaw Uprising.

http://www.warsawuprising.com/paper/baczynski.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzysztof_Kamil_Baczyński
http://falcon.tamucc.edu/~sencerz/baczynski.htm


Worth reading I guess.