Ex-Basketball Player (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: John Updike
- First Published: 1958
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
The Poem
John Updike’s “Ex-Basketball Player,” a poem of five stanzas each containing six lines and written in blank verse, describes the life of Flick Webb, once a high-school basketball star but now, his glorious past several years behind him, a gas-station attendant whose life appears to have reached a dead end. The first stanza begins with brief geographical detail of Flick’s hometown, a town never named in the poem but presumably somewhere fairly small and rural (possibly like Updike’s own hometown of Shillington, Pennsylvania). The reader learns that Flick...
[The entire page is 1667 words long]
