as if it were the Iliad. Lowell’s aristocratic birth and his closeness to the N.Y. reviewers combine with everyone’s longing to have a great poet living —now that Eliot and Roethke and Frost are dead—and the result is an unbelievable chorus of praise. I am attacking the book sharply in the next issue of The Sixties, and everyone will say: There’s that old grouch again!
I thought there were six or seven good or at least readable poems in the book. The best without question was “The Mouth of the Hudson.” (It is a sort of farewell to Williams, who lived just across the Hudson, in New Jersey, and a sort of rebuke as well to the Beats that grew out of him: “One cannot find America by counting the freight cars.”) Also interesting I thought were “The Old Flame,” “The Flaw,” “For the Union Dead,” and in parts at least, “Water”; “Fall, 1961”; and “Night Sweat.”
The rest seemed to me bombast, like a bad evangelical preacher.
Yes, that barn was the one in “Snowfall in the Afternoon.” The stair in front was added recently. It used to move even better before that! Now the stair looks like its anchor, thrown out before it. I see what you mean about the face. It should have been a face: my father and I built the barn in the ’40s.
Jim Wright is staying with his parents: c/o Dudley Wright, 66 East Main Street, New Concord, Ohio. He is on a Guggenheim. I’ll send along a new poem of his, and a new poem of mine.
Write soon. My fond hellos to
Monica—
Yours,
Robert
P.S. How strange about Loftus! We stayed there. It’s across the fjord from the urgammel Bleie gard.
17 Feb., ’65[66]
Dear Tomas,
Christina and I are finally getting ready to print the selected poems of Ekelöf we’ve been working on for five years or so, lazily. I translated some of Lindegren’s essay on him as the main introduction. Then I wrote this little squib to go in the front of the book. Would you glance at it? Does it sound ridiculous or fairly sound?
Yours as ever,
Robert
P.S. No need to return it—just mention it in your next letter.
P.P.S. My best to Monica!
A Note on Gunnar Ekelöf
Gunnar Ekelöf was born in 1907. Many critics consider him the greatest living Swedish poet. He reached out early in his career to two sources outside the Scandinavian tradition: the mystical poetry of Persia in particular, and the Orient in general, and French poetry, especially the surrealist poetry of the late ’20’s. His poetry also has deep roots in Fröding, Almqvist, and the Swedish fairy tales.
In Swedish literature there is a much firmer division between the proletariat and the aristocratic writing than there is in America or England. There have been a succession of great writers in Sweden who took their place naturally in one of these two groups. Harry Martinson is one of the greatest proletarian poets. It is as if in what James Farrell represents there were poets as sensitive as Wallace Stevens. Gunnar Ekelöf, on the other hand, very clearly belongs to the second group, the writers that are aristocratic, intellectual, elegant.
Some of his poems are made of linked successions of thoughts not easy to follow. These thoughts are embodied in high-spirited and eccentric language. Gunnar Ekelöf is the most difficult Swedish poet; yet, despite the difficulty, his audience is very large. His books of poems are published in editions comparable, given the difference in population, to printings of 200,000 in the U.S. He is an uncomfortable poet, who tries to make the reader conscious of lies.
The ideas which his work returns to again and again have been brought out clearly in an essay by the Swedish poet Eric Lindegren. I have chosen and translated sections from that essay, which appear elsewhere in this book.
Gunnar Ekelöf was elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1958, and is now the youngest member of that body.
—ROBERT BLY
Västerås 3-1-66
Dear Robert,
this godawful wolf-winter is
I thought there were six or seven good or at least readable poems in the book. The best without question was “The Mouth of the Hudson.” (It is a sort of farewell to Williams, who lived just across the Hudson, in New Jersey, and a sort of rebuke as well to the Beats that grew out of him: “One cannot find America by counting the freight cars.”) Also interesting I thought were “The Old Flame,” “The Flaw,” “For the Union Dead,” and in parts at least, “Water”; “Fall, 1961”; and “Night Sweat.”
The rest seemed to me bombast, like a bad evangelical preacher.
Yes, that barn was the one in “Snowfall in the Afternoon.” The stair in front was added recently. It used to move even better before that! Now the stair looks like its anchor, thrown out before it. I see what you mean about the face. It should have been a face: my father and I built the barn in the ’40s.
Jim Wright is staying with his parents: c/o Dudley Wright, 66 East Main Street, New Concord, Ohio. He is on a Guggenheim. I’ll send along a new poem of his, and a new poem of mine.
Write soon. My fond hellos to
Monica—
Yours,
Robert
P.S. How strange about Loftus! We stayed there. It’s across the fjord from the urgammel Bleie gard.
17 Feb., ’65[66]
Dear Tomas,
Christina and I are finally getting ready to print the selected poems of Ekelöf we’ve been working on for five years or so, lazily. I translated some of Lindegren’s essay on him as the main introduction. Then I wrote this little squib to go in the front of the book. Would you glance at it? Does it sound ridiculous or fairly sound?
Yours as ever,
Robert
P.S. No need to return it—just mention it in your next letter.
P.P.S. My best to Monica!
A Note on Gunnar Ekelöf
Gunnar Ekelöf was born in 1907. Many critics consider him the greatest living Swedish poet. He reached out early in his career to two sources outside the Scandinavian tradition: the mystical poetry of Persia in particular, and the Orient in general, and French poetry, especially the surrealist poetry of the late ’20’s. His poetry also has deep roots in Fröding, Almqvist, and the Swedish fairy tales.
In Swedish literature there is a much firmer division between the proletariat and the aristocratic writing than there is in America or England. There have been a succession of great writers in Sweden who took their place naturally in one of these two groups. Harry Martinson is one of the greatest proletarian poets. It is as if in what James Farrell represents there were poets as sensitive as Wallace Stevens. Gunnar Ekelöf, on the other hand, very clearly belongs to the second group, the writers that are aristocratic, intellectual, elegant.
Some of his poems are made of linked successions of thoughts not easy to follow. These thoughts are embodied in high-spirited and eccentric language. Gunnar Ekelöf is the most difficult Swedish poet; yet, despite the difficulty, his audience is very large. His books of poems are published in editions comparable, given the difference in population, to printings of 200,000 in the U.S. He is an uncomfortable poet, who tries to make the reader conscious of lies.
The ideas which his work returns to again and again have been brought out clearly in an essay by the Swedish poet Eric Lindegren. I have chosen and translated sections from that essay, which appear elsewhere in this book.
Gunnar Ekelöf was elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1958, and is now the youngest member of that body.
—ROBERT BLY
Västerås 3-1-66
Dear Robert,
this godawful wolf-winter is
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