POETRY IN REVIEW

1 9 0 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W C Y N T H I A Z A R I N ‘‘A poem is itself an act, part of the life it describes,’’ wrote David Kalstone in the introduction to Five Temperaments, his study of the poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, and John Ashbery. Kalstone’s consummate gaze was compassionate, interested, and serene. He was writing about poets whom he fully expected to produce more poems – work whose contours he had begun to imagine but could not yet fathom, as one never can. Of his five poets, however, three would not live into what we might call the start of old age. Kalstone’s book was published in 1977; within two years, both Lowell and Bishop were dead. Lowell died that September, at sixty, in a taxi on his way from the airport to the New York apartment where he had lived for many years with his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Bishop died two years later in Boston at sixty-eight of a cerebral aneurysm . Merrill, of whom Helen Vendler had written, ‘‘The time H u m a n C h a i n , by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 96 pp. $24) W h i t e E g r e t s : P o e m s , by Derek Walcott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 96 pp., $24) S e l e c t e d P o e m s , by Amy Clampitt, edited by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf Doubleday, 352 pp., $19.95 paper) H e a v e n l y Q u e s t i o n s , by Gjertrud Schnackenberg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 80 pp., $23) 1 9 1 R eventually comes, in a good poet’s career, when readers actively long for his books, to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life,’’ lasted longer, dying in 1995 at the age of sixty-eight. (Kalstone himself died at fifty-three, before finishing his extraordinary study of Bishop, Becoming a Poet, which was later edited by Robert Hemenway and provided with an afterword by Merrill.) The dreadful symmetry of the early deaths of many of the most important poets writing in English in the twentieth century has interrupted the possibilities of what might have been said in our time. By the early 1970s, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Sylvia Plath had died by their own hand. Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, and Frank O’Hara were also dead. In January 1995, six months after Merrill’s death, Joseph Brodsky died at fifty-five. Both deaths were ascribed to heart attacks. Brodsky, who had served eighteen months of a five-year sentence of hard labor in a Soviet prison camp near Arkhangel’sk, had been in frail health for years; Merrill died of AIDS: both deaths could be described as symptoms of the century. From these poets we have no late poetry or poetry of old age. In an essay called ‘‘Child of Civilization,’’ Brodsky wrote, For some odd reason, the expression ‘‘death of a poet’’ always sounds somewhat more concrete than ‘‘life of a poet.’’ Perhaps this is because both ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘poet,’’ as words, are almost synonymous in their positive vagueness. Whereas ‘‘death’’ – even as a word – is about as definite as a poet’s own production, i.e., a poem, the main feature of which is its last line. Whatever a work of art consists of, it runs to the finale which makes for its form and denies resurrection. After the last line of a poem nothing follows except literary criticism. So when we read a poet, we participate in his or his works’ death. It is not possible to imagine the landscape of English and American poetry had these poets lived into old age, to know what, reading them, we might have learned about ourselves and our time, nor what their influence would have meant to a new generation of writers. Lowell said of Bishop that her poems seemed to him like poetry written by someone...