Speak the speech … trippingly: an anthology features poets reading their own work, with early recordings by Tennyson and Browning and masterful turns by T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop and Langston Hughes

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 11, 2002 | by Rex Roberts, | Martin Robin

Yet even the most vigorous practitioners of willfully obscure modernism -- Ezra Pound and H.D. (as Hilda Doolittle called herself) -- now seem lucid, even nostalgic. T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which shocked the literary establishment in 1917, serves as the centerpiece for an anthology that could be used as a textbook in the more liberal high schools.

Well, it's fun to listen to poets read their work and identity those who, according to one's personal aesthetics, render words with "passionate syntax" (while dismissing the others as elocutionarily challenged). Certain poets seem perennials in the Yeats stage-door contest: Carl Sandburg, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks. Others surprise and delight: Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton (especially her reading of "The Operation" one of the few long poems presented complete).

Listeners can argue over which poets were included and which weren't (why John Crowe Ransom, who stopped writing poetry before age 40, and not his fellow Fugitive and Agrarian, Robert Penn Warren, the first official poet laureate of the United States?). Indeed, some of the lesser known poets in the collection -- Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, William Stafford -- give the most compelling readings.

What to think about poets who deliver lackluster renditions of their work? Ironically, critics considered Yeats a poor actor and reader despite his enthusiasm -- one complained that he read in a "dreary monotone with care only for the beat of a measure." Similarly, Whitman, whose robust verse wants vigorous reading, has a frail, tinny voice (there's some question about the authenticity of the wax-cylinder recording), as does William Carlos Williams -- two distinctly American poets who speak through their noses. Perhaps Sourcebooks should issue a deluxe edition of Poetry Speaks, with stage and radio stars interpreting great poems of the 20th century. As Ginsberg knew, a little showbiz never hurt.

RELATED ARTICLE: Eros and Poetry.

What Lord Byron was to early 19th-century literary culture, Edna St. Vincent Millay was to that of the first half of the 20th century. Each was an accomplished poet whose personality became as important as the poetry in establishing an extraordinary degree of fame and success.

Immense success and popularity do not always bring critical esteem, but Millay .(like Byron) had it all for several decades after she burst upon the literary scene in the years leading up to World War I. Her verse, rooted in 19th-century English and American poetry, was never part of the modernist movement and, as New Criticism and modernism tightened their grip on critical opinion midway through the century, her reputation waned.

Fortunately, a new biography by Nancy Milford should go a long way toward restoring Millay to her rightful place in the pantheon of American poets. Savage Beauty (Random House, $29.95, 550 pp), 30 years in the making, is the product of exhaustive research and the repository of much information confided to the author by Millay's surviving sister. It also is that rare biography that gives the subject's oeuvre its due while necessarily concentrating on the life.