Poetry - Literary Criticism, US & Canadian Literary Biography, Literary Theory, Interviews, Writing

Their Ancient Glittering Eyes

Name: Their Ancient Glittering Eyes
Author: Donald Hall
ISBN: 9780899199795

by Donald Hall

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Overview

Donald Hall has written a vivid memoir of the eminent poets of our century. While still a student, Donald Hall came to know Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and T. S. Eliot. He interviewed Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore for The Paris Review, and his portraits, anecdotes, descriptions, criticisms, and literary gossip, drawn from life

About the Author, Donald Hall

Donald Hall is the fourteenth poet laureate of the United States and the author of more than two dozen books of poems and prose, including White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006. His work has garnered many honors, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for The One Day; the Lenore Marshall Award for The Happy Man; the Robert Frost Silver Medal from the Poetry Society of America for Old and New Poems; and the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments. His poetry collection Without, which was written for Jane Kenyon during and after her illness, received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hall continues to inhabit the New Hampshire farmhouse where he and Jane Kenyon lived together.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``Curiosity endures, surviving criticism or philosophy,'' affirms poet and critic Hall ( Here at Eagle Pond ) as he introduces a distinguished gallery of poets--Frost, Thomas, Eliot, Moore, MacLeish, Winters, Pound--with verisimilitude and freshness enough to satisfy readers. An expansion and revision of Remembering Poets (1978), this records the younger Hall's involvement with the ``old ones'' even as it adds depth and grace to his designated genre of ``literary gossip.'' His respect for the writers does not preclude frankness or significant revelations: readers learn that the elderly Frost, behind his mask of benign farmer-poet and eventual reputation as a monstrous egotist, was startlingly vulnerable--burdened with sadness, driven by guilt. The most thorough portrait follows Hall's relations with Eliot, disclosing a personality rather than a ``monument''--an unusually humorous and surprisingly ``American'' poet. And his reminiscences of the lonely, disconcerted Pound may be the book's most insightful. Although Hall's voice in these recollections and interviews is quiet, even self-effacing, he writes as a trustworthy and sympathetic witness, one who reveres his subjects: ``Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone.'' (Aug.)

Booknews

An enlarged edition of poet Hall's highly acclaimed Remembering Poets (1978), adding to his reminiscences of Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas, essays on Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, and Yvor Winters. An appendix adds four interviews--Eliot, Pound, and Moore twice--that occasioned some of Hall's encounters with these poets. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)