POETRY IN REVIEW NO PLACE FOR SISSIES: SEIDEL & STERN

1 7 2 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W G E O R G E B R A D L E Y Old age is no place for sissies, as the saying goes, and it’s not usually a place for poetry, either. If painting is an art in which experience tells and the accumulation of technique enriches, poetry is one in which careers have often waned as youthful energy and ambition have dissipated. We regard the late work of Rembrandt or Titian or Bellini with fascination and even awe. We treat the late work of Wordsworth or Milton or Whitman with forbearance and perhaps apology. As a rule, poets once arrived at their distinct identities do not improve much thereafter, and they are in danger of significant decline over time. Yeats and Stevens are the major exceptions to this rule, but the exceptions are not many. Poetry is not an old person’s game. Poetry is most often an a√air of youth (English poetry especially ; in America, it seems to be more an a√air of middle age), and it is a field, like rock music, in which dying young is the fashionable thing to do. Still, most poets survive to age along with the rest of I n B e a u t y B r i g h t , by Gerald Stern (Norton, 128 pp., $25.95) S t e a l i n g H i s t o r y , by Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 314 pp., $24.95; $17.95, paper) N i c e W e a t h e r, by Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 112 pp., $24) 1 7 3 R the population, and sooner or later they must confront the problem of pursuing their craft into their geriatric years. As life spans lengthen, and as our nation’s demographic profile matures, this problem grows ever more prevalent, and there are currently quite a few accomplished authors who find themselves facing it. One thinks of W. S. Merwin’s poems of insomnia, the early-morning musings of an old man poised at the borders of existence and the edge of the world (well, poised in Hai’ku, Hawaii, at any rate). One thinks of John Ashbery, who has given us a veritable diary of what it feels like to sit day by day in the anticipation of death. Or of the late A. R. Ammons, whose final book included weary poems that counseled patience at the urinal. The past year has seen the publication of new books by two older poets – Gerald Stern and Frederick Seidel – whose verse is now thoroughly informed by what Yeats called the wisdom that is bodily decrepitude. Gerald Stern had to wait for attention, but the attention came. Born in 1925, he was forty-six before his first real book of poems appeared, and he was in his fifties by the time he found a major publisher. His work did not enjoy early acclaim, but he has been much noticed in later life, and he has by now been a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets as well as the winner of many prizes, including the National Book Award and the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement. Indeed, he has become well known in recent years for not being well known before, so much so that the poet has expressed some irritation on the subject. His new collection of poems, In Beauty Bright, appears in conjunction with a collection of brief autobiographical essays titled Stealing History, and the two volumes can be used to illuminate each other. In Stealing History, Stern makes it clear that making his way as a poet required a good deal of e√ort early on and that if success arrived late it was not due to a late blooming of talent but rather to the necessity of balancing his career as a writer with many other time-consuming occupations. And he doesn’t think writing strong poems at an advanced age is worthy of applause in itself: ‘‘Enfin, maybe my admirers will leave me...