Summary
How has he managed to transcend the influences of the Robert Lowell of Life Studies and the John Berryman of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and write several independent books of poetry? Sometimes he separates those horses: "Pound catches the thermals in every language, and soars. / Eliot rises in the pew to kneel. / When he opens his mouth it is a choir," he writes more smartly than justly in "On Wings of Song." There is nothing here to compare with Eliot's lines in "Little Gidding": And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
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Extract
Songs of Himself
Songs of Himself Poems 1959-2009 Frederick Seidel Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $40, 509 pp.
I should declare an interest, as parlia' mentarians used to say. Years ago in New York City, I was introduced to Frederick Seidel by our mutual friend Richard Poirier. Some time after, Seidel invited me to join a small dinner party he was planning to give at Elio's. I had never heard of that restaurant, but ...See the full content of this document
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