-
Three: Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon “Art Is Created against Death”
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
113 three donald hall and jane kenyon “Art Is Created against Death” Donald Hall’s relationship with Jane Kenyon began in 1969, when she enrolled in his large undergraduate course An Introduction to Poetry for Non-English Majors at the University of Michigan. He never met her individually in the class of 140 students, but the following summer she was accepted into his small poetry workshop. He recognized her talent as soon as he read her poem “The Needle,” which she had written at the age of nineteen. Their friendship began in January 1971. They were at first wary of each other, partly because of the failure of recent relationships —two years earlier Hall had divorced his wife, to whom he had been married for fifteen years, and Kenyon was also ending a painful relationship. Did they want to begin a new relationship so quickly after the end of failed relationships? Then there was the age factor—he was nineteen years older than she. As he reveals in The Best Day the Worst Day, misgivings about a new marriage assailed him. He did not know for certain whether he loved her, nor did he know whether he wished to spend the rest of his life with her. Other doubts plagued him. Would she be sympathetic to the time he needed to continue his life as a creative writer? Would her desire to become a poet last? Would the inequality of the teacher-student relationship lead to the equality necessary in a good marriage? They found themselves drawn toward each other despite these doubts, and they decided on Christmas Day of 1971 to marry the following year. He was forty-three, she twenty-four. Four years later they moved to his ancestral farmhouse, Eagle Pond Farm, built by his greatgrandfather at the foot of Mount Kearsarge in Wilmot, New Hampshire, where they lived until her death in 1995 at the age of forty-seven. 114 donald hall and jane kenyon Hall and Kenyon had a close and loving marriage, each nurturing the other’s creativity. Intimate marriages such as theirs are rare, especially when husband and wife are both poets who seek to craft their own unique voices without attempting to dominate, compete with, subvert, or silence the other’s. Unlike most couples, Hall and Kenyon lived in the same house in which they worked, which made it difficult to separate their personal and professional lives. That they were able to do so makes their marriage more remarkable. Rarely were they separated from each other for more than a few days. It was at Eagle Pond Farm that Kenyon emerged as an important American poet, creating short lyrical poems that gained the admiration of the literary community. Long before he met Kenyon, Hall was a prolific and successful writer, the recipient of many honors and awards, including poet laureate of New Hampshire—a title that was bestowed on Kenyon at the end of her life—but as a result of their marriage, he became a love poet, able to imagine a husband’s devotion to and intimacy with his wife. As he writes in The Old Life, “We learned how to love each other/by loving together/good things wholly outside each other” (82). In 2006, eleven years after his wife’s death, he was appointed U.S. poet laureate. Hall and Kenyon were the subject of Bill Moyers’s documentary A Life Together, broadcast on PBS in 1993, and Moyers included interviews with both poets in his 1995 book The Language of Life. Both wrote about depression, cancer, marital love, and the fear of losing each other. Devoted to each other in sickness and in health, they both developed serious forms of cancer that tested their faith in themselves and in each other. Each became the other’s caregiver, writing poems and, in Hall’s case, several essays and a stunning memoir, about the other. Long before Kenyon’s illness, Hall was keenly aware of the theme of loss in his life. “I’ve come to think that the sense of being abandoned is central to my spirit,” he observes in an interview published in his 1978 book Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird (8). Elaborating, he points out that many poems are elegiac—“not just over death, but over the loss of youth, or the loss of friends” (8). The theme of loss, he suggests, may arise from the memory of birth and thus is universal. “Being born is a kind of...