Ah, Thanksgiving is past, and Christmas looms ahead rapidly. I can't believe how fast time flies in retirement.
We spent Thanksgiving in Danville, Virginia, with our daughter, and after the turkey, the dressing, the potato casserole, the cranberry sauce, and the apricot nectar cake, that Thursday feast, we went to the Goodwill on Black Friday. The Goodwill in Danville has one of the finest collections of used books I have ever seen. I came away with several, but two I want to talk about.
I could hardly believe I found The Lost World by Randall Jarrell (1985) and The Fugitive Poets, edited by William Pratt (1965). As an undergraduate, I studied under Mr. Jarrell, even doing a senior Honors Project in poetry under his direction. In a Modern Poetry class, we listened spellbound as he read and explained poems by Frost, Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and, yes, John Crowe Ransom. Jarrell had been a student of Ransom's, and so he was sort of second generation Fugitive, though I'm sure he didn't think of himself in that light. Next to Frost and Yeats, I loved the poetry of John Crowe Ransom, "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," "The Equilibrists," "The Vanity of the Blue Girls." I didn't get to know much about the other Fugitives till much later. I heard Allan Tate read Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when I was in graduate school, and then and only then did it bring tears to my eyes. (As a college freshman, I had hated that poem.) But the poem that struck my in this volume was a poem by Donald Davidson, "On a Replica of the Parthenon." The previous owner of this book has inked in "across st. from Vanderbilt." The poem captures the ironic contrast between the Greek ideal and the modern Nashville reality.
Shop-girls embrace a plaster thought,
And eye Poseidon's loins ungirt,
And never heed the brandished spear . . . .
It reminds me of Jarrell's "The Girl in the Library," wherein the poet watches the student curled up sleeping over her lessons. I was that girl, but poetry awakened me, and now I recommend to you the poetry of Randall Jarrell and his teachers, The Fugitives, his professors at Vanderbilt. Look for them in your library.
Have a good Christmas.
We spent Thanksgiving in Danville, Virginia, with our daughter, and after the turkey, the dressing, the potato casserole, the cranberry sauce, and the apricot nectar cake, that Thursday feast, we went to the Goodwill on Black Friday. The Goodwill in Danville has one of the finest collections of used books I have ever seen. I came away with several, but two I want to talk about.
I could hardly believe I found The Lost World by Randall Jarrell (1985) and The Fugitive Poets, edited by William Pratt (1965). As an undergraduate, I studied under Mr. Jarrell, even doing a senior Honors Project in poetry under his direction. In a Modern Poetry class, we listened spellbound as he read and explained poems by Frost, Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and, yes, John Crowe Ransom. Jarrell had been a student of Ransom's, and so he was sort of second generation Fugitive, though I'm sure he didn't think of himself in that light. Next to Frost and Yeats, I loved the poetry of John Crowe Ransom, "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," "The Equilibrists," "The Vanity of the Blue Girls." I didn't get to know much about the other Fugitives till much later. I heard Allan Tate read Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when I was in graduate school, and then and only then did it bring tears to my eyes. (As a college freshman, I had hated that poem.) But the poem that struck my in this volume was a poem by Donald Davidson, "On a Replica of the Parthenon." The previous owner of this book has inked in "across st. from Vanderbilt." The poem captures the ironic contrast between the Greek ideal and the modern Nashville reality.
Shop-girls embrace a plaster thought,
And eye Poseidon's loins ungirt,
And never heed the brandished spear . . . .
It reminds me of Jarrell's "The Girl in the Library," wherein the poet watches the student curled up sleeping over her lessons. I was that girl, but poetry awakened me, and now I recommend to you the poetry of Randall Jarrell and his teachers, The Fugitives, his professors at Vanderbilt. Look for them in your library.
Have a good Christmas.
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