I

In 1978, when he was fifty, Donald Hall published his seventh book of poems, Kicking the Leaves, to widespread acclaim. Hall's reputation as a critic, anthologist, editor, literary journalist (and, arguably, one of our leading persons of letters) was by then already established. Almost suddenly Hall was talked about as a poet. The publication of his next book, The Happy Man, eight years later, more than enhanced Hall's reputation. At fifty-eight, Hall not only was writing poems as well as he ever had, but was writing, some claimed, as well as anyone in his generation. The Happy Man (which received The Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize) served as a prelude for The One Day, published two years later, on Hall's sixtieth birthday. In The Washington Post Book World, David Lehman unequivocally declared the book “major work.” Widely, often extravagantly, praised, The One Day received the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

Last year Ticknor & Fields—in a beautifully-designed edition—published Hall's Old and New Poems. Old and New Poems isn't a “new and selected poems.” In fact, Hall doesn't present his “old” poems by the books in which they appeared; instead, he divides the poems into nine time periods, the “old” poems beginning “1947–1953” and ending “1979–1986,” the twenty-two “new” poems (which have the force of a book) designated “1987–1990.” The poems from The One Day are excluded. In a Note, Hall acknowledges that he has altered many of the “old” poems; he is among those poets (Yeats, Moore, and Lowell are others) who sometimes (and sometimes extensively) revise earlier published work. Clearly, in Old and New Poems, Hall presents the “old” work in the context of the “new,” so that the reader sees the poems as part of a work continuously in progress.

Old and New Poems is an important book. It not only represents the achievements of one of the best poets of a prodigiously talented generation; its qualities also measure American poetry at the end of the Modernist century. Hall's poetry is aesthetically ambitious—as complex, actually, as the century's aesthetic undercurrents. Old and New Poems also reflects the gifts of a poet whose powers have expanded during his fifties, into his sixties—a rare accomplishment.

There are multiple ways Hall's poetry might be valuably critiqued: a textual scrutiny—a variorum—of his revisions, comparing the changes; an analysis of the compelling metamorphoses of certain subjects and emotions; or a look at the relationship of Hall's prose—both literary and journalistic—to his poetry. But, at the very least, Hall's poetry requires an appreciation of its formal and aesthetic dimensions. Hall's ability to embody the aesthetic landscapes of post-World War II America immediately impresses the reader of Old and New Poems. Hall is part of a generation that has had to confront the continuous effects of Modernism. His catholic critical tastes (as an anthologist, most recently of The Best American Poetry (1989) he has been a tastemaker); his passion for chronicling the art (as the first Poetry Editor of The Paris Review, he helped popularize the interview form); his editorial largesse (as an advisor to Wesleyan University Press during the 1960s, he had a say in publishing the early work of James Wright, John Ashbery, Louis Simpson, James Dickey, Robert Bly); his cutting-edge essays and reviews on the state of the art written from outside the creative writing business: Hall keeps in touch with poetic currencies. Old and New Poems and The One Day reveal that Hall's appreciation of the art of poetry first of all exists in his poems.

II

In a 1981 essay, “The Poetry Notebook: Two,” in talking about the avant-garde, Hall accurately observed: “If one notion ties much of the avant-garde together, over the past thirty years, it is concentration on construction rather than feeling or idea. This construction may be aleatory, a concentration on the method of construction rather than on an intended shape.” In addition, Hall described the distinction between constructivism and expressionism which focuses, critically, on a poem's aesthetic emphasis on either “form” or “feeling”:

[f]rom time to time people have fiddled with dividing art into two camps called after the names of the two movements: constructivism and expressionism. (I use small letters to indicate a usage more general than the movements named by capitalization.) Expressionist art expresses feeling (by distortion, exaggeration, fantasy); feeling is its end. Constructivism concentrates on form …¹

This commonly-used conceptualization of Modernist art, however—valid as it is—doesn't take into account what actually distinguishes Modernist poetry: the critical role of a poem's language. When language becomes the primary focus, the “form”-“feeling” dichotomy takes on secondary importance; “constructivism” and “expressionism” take on different meanings.

As good a place as any to begin defining Modernist notions of poetic language is Sigurd Burckhardt's little-known but brilliant 1956 essay, “The Poet as Fool and Priest”:

If there were a language pure enough to transmit all human experience without distortion, there would be no need for poetry. But such a language not only does not, it cannot exist. Language can no more do justice to all human truth than law can to all human wishes. In its very nature as a social instrument it must be a convention, must arbitrarily order the chaos of experiences, allowing expression to some, denying it to others. It must provide common denominators, and so it necessarily falsifies, just as the law necessarily inflicts injustice. And these falsifications will be the more dangerous the more “transparent” language seems to become, the more unquestionably it is accepted as an undistorting medium. It is not windowglass but rather a system of lenses which focus and refract the rays of an hypothetical unmediated vision.²

Modernist language cannot be “transparent”; language, by its nature, is “social”; language “arbitrarily orders,” by expression, “the chaos of experience”; verbal meaning arises out of a language of juxtaposed refraction. In this sense, “expressionism”—as its most astute and eloquent proponent Gottfried Benn argued—is at the heart of Modernism: “the complete parallel in aesthetic terms to modern physics and its abstract interpretations of the world, the expressive parallel to non-euclidian mathematics, which abandoned the classical concept of the last 2,000 years in favor of abstract spatial dimensions. … The expressionist [knows] the profound, technical mastery that art demands, its craft ethos, the moral of form.”³ The language of Modernist poetry, as Susanne K. Langer argues, is “abstract”: “The relation of poetry to the world of facts is the same as that of painting to the world of objects; actual events, if they enter into its orbit at all, are motifs of poetry, as actual objects are motifs of painting.”⁴ A modernist poem must be aware of its form.

If the emphasis is on language, a poem's verbal constructions are more important, in the first instance, than an emphasis on either “form” or “feeling.” As Burckhardt put it: “The first purpose of poetic language … is the very opposite of making language more transparent.” Restated, the first purpose of poetic language is verbally to refract or focus, to form meanings which, because of the nature of language, are social. Looked at this way, the aesthetic topography of Modernist poetry is more complex than the “form”-“feeling” dichotomy. On one side of the spectrum is poetry that does nothing creatively to dispel or refract “transparent” language. Over the past fifteen years, many critics have lambasted a certain type of “first-person” “free verse” poem. The type of poem that deserves disdain, however, isn't, necessarily, a “free verse” poem that uses “I” (a patently absurd basis of critique), but, instead, a poem which, by its formal decisions, does nothing to focus or refract the subjective language of the “I”—by meter, rhyme, lineation, diction, rhythm, stanza, syntax, as well as rhetorical devices such as irony and anaphora. In fact, the “new-formalist” poem that apes conventional metrical and rhyming devices is as “transparent” as the earnest “free verse” poem that does nothing formally or structurally to focus or refract meaning. As Burckhardt perceived, the essential problem with a poem that makes its language transparent is that it fundamentally lies: … “[S]uch a language not only does not, it cannot exist.” It is artifice, not art. Its verbal effects are no more artistically viable than the verbal effects of journalism; nothing in its language—to paraphrase Pound—creates “news that stays news.”

Once poems that make language transparent are appropriately dismissed, a reader is, aesthetically, in the realm of poetry—where language is most intensely refracted and focused into meaning and emotion. To understand the intricate aesthetic variations that exist within this realm, I often return to an essay by Roland Barthes, “Is There Any Poetic Writing?” in which Barthes makes the distinction between “classical” and “modern” poetic language. “Classical” language, he says, is full of connections that

lead the word on, and at once carry it toward a meaning which is an ever-deferred project. … Classical language is always reducible to a persuasive continuum, it postulates the possibilities of dialogue, it establishes a universe in which men are not alone, where words never have the terrible weight of things, where speech is always meeting with the other.

On the contrary,

modern poetry destroyed relationships in language and reduced discourse to words as static things. This implies a reversal in our knowledge of nature. The interrupted flow of the new poetic language initiates a discontinuous nature, which is revealed only piecemeal. … Modern poetry is a poetry of object.⁵

Barthes doesn't say it, but it is important to see that a poem written in “classical” language need not be formally “transparent”; a poet can form, through “possibilities of dialogue,” language that refracts or focuses “transparent” discourse. Of major twentieth-century poets, Yeats, Rilke, Frost, and Brecht are examples of “classical” poets—all masters, in different ways, of form, but at the same time believers in the communicative and dialogical values of words. What Barthes classifies as “modern” poetic language, on the other hand, defies the very notion of “transparent” language. Among major American poets—to varying, complicated extents—Williams, Moore, Pound, and Stevens could be classified as “modern” under Barthes's distinction. Of course, none of these poets completely denies “classical” dialogue (Stevens especially). But, as different as they are, these “modernists” share, imaginatively, a profound sense of the fragmentation of social and emotional realities, and a strong sense of the poem's form containing, at least at some level of perception, something that can be looked at separately, something “objective,” different, and apart, from the poem's more communicative expressions. Not surprisingly, each of these poets, again in different ways, considered him -or herself part of the “avant-garde” (although, today, the avant-garde is identified, for the most part, with poets who completely reject the dictates and fictions of “classical” language). What is clear at the end of the Modernist century is this: critical tensions in American poetry exist between “transparent” poetic language, on the one hand, and “refracted” poetic language on the other, and—among refracted poetries—between poetic languages that are “classical” or “modern.”

III

What is clear from Donald Hall's Old and New Poems is his consistent, even aggressive, resistance to “transparent” language. From the very beginning, Hall creates language that refracts unmediated “transparency.” Hall's poetic impulse is fundamentally formal. This isn't to say that Hall is a poet without subject matter: he very much is, and always has been. From the beginning, he has articulated, metamorphosed, and combined his themes: an acute awareness of grief and loss grounded in personal experiences with death; a strong sense of family and genealogy; a deeply-felt reaction to the elements, to things of the earth; a moralist's edginess toward power and its manifestations, especially war; identification with children, both on social and personal levels; a compelling sense of the physical universe; an awareness of art, and its making; a strong desire for happiness and love, on personal, religious, and social levels; and a profound historical sense of place (especially the locale of his ancestral farm in New Hampshire, where he now lives). But it is, critically, impossible to think of Hall's subjects without considering the ways in which he consciously forms his language to include them.

The language of the early poems is exclusively “classical.” In the first two time designations in Old and New Poems, “1947–1953” and “1954–1958,” the poems are written mostly according to metrical schemes, in syllabics, with end-rhymes, and in stanzas of consistent linear lengths throughout a poem (in the poems “1954–1958,” less imposed, more “open” forms are occasionally used). All of these poems have vitality still—verbal sharpness, emotional sting. Listen, for example, to the edgy, almost colloquial pentameter of the concluding stanza of the lament, “Exile”:

Exiled by years, by death no dream conceals,
By worlds that must remain unvisited,
And by the wounds that growing never heals,
We are as solitary as the dead,
Wanting to king it in that perfect land
We make and understand.
And in this world whose pattern is unmade,
Phases of splintered light and shapeless sand,
We shatter through our motions and evade
Whatever hand might reach and touch our hand.

Or, to the intensely compressed and subtly rhymed syllabic quatrains of “Je Suis Une Table,” in which the poem's formalization of language is, itself, a subject to which the poet responds emotionally:

It has happened suddenly,
by surprise, in an arbor,
or while drinking good coffee,
after speaking, or before,
that I dumbly inhabit
a density; in language
there is nothing to stop it,
for nothing retains an edge.
Simple ignorance presents
later, words for a function,
but it is common pretense
of speech, by a convention,
and there is nothing at all
but inner silence, nothing
to relive on principle
now this intense thickening.

Or listen, for a change of pace, to the opening pentameter lines of “1934”—a narrative packed with historical details—quickened by rhymed couplets:

In nineteen-thirty-four we spent July
At a small farm, my mother's father's. I
Was five years old. Father got White's News Letter,
Fridays, which said that things were looking better.
Bright Model A's kept speeding past each day,
Fouled by the eagles of the N.R.A.
And blew their brassy horns at us, the farm
Where nothing and no one ever came to harm.

Or, for a more flexibly expressed emotional density, the opening quatrain of “The Kiss”:

The backs twist with the kiss
and the mouth which is the hurt
and the green depth of it
holds plainly the hour.

By 1958—at the age of thirty—Hall's formal and substantive range are impressive: his primary sense of a poem already is its language. You can't miss the poet's preoccupation with metrical, linear, and syntactical expressions, his deep imaginative response to the ways words, within formal structures, come to sound in language.

In the poems after 1958, though, something altogether different aesthetically happens: Hall pretty much abandons predictable metrical lineation and end-rhymes, aggressively compressing his language within “open” verbal structures. His focus shifts to visual, musical, and psychological expressions of image. As the aesthetic expands, so do Hall's probings into the relationship between form and emotion. One extremely strong poem, “Internal and External Forms,” is directly on point:

What the birds say
is colored. Shade
feels the thickness
shrubs make in a
July growth,
heavy brown thorns
for autumn, curled
horns in double
rows. Listening
the birds fly
down, in shade. Leaves
of darkness turn
inward, noises
curve inward, and
the seed talks.

Like “The Kiss,” “Internal and External Forms” is based upon a work of art—“The Kiss” after an Edvard Munch painting, “Internal and External Forms” after a sculpture by Henry Moore (whom Hall has referred to as his “most important teacher”⁶). By not referencing the poems, Hall gives them an immediate abstract quality. Then, by the juxtaposition of images, the compressed quality of the quatrains, and the lovely shaped sounds accentuated by enjambments, Hall makes the poem primarily an object for aesthetic satisfaction—like a piece of sculpture. The poem's first “meanings” are the ways in which its language forms; the poem's other “meanings”—the inward and outward existences of the physical world—are located within the language. Henry Moore was an avowed Modernist; “Internal and External Forms” is primarily a “modern” poem—as are many others written by Hall during this time. One of the most beautiful is “The Long River”:

The musk ox smells
in his long head
my boat coming. When
I feel him there,
intent, heavy,
the oars make wings
in the white night,
and deep woods are close
on either side
where trees darken.
I rowed past towns
in their black sleep
to come here. I passed
the northern grass
and cold mountains.
The musk ox moves
when the boat stops,
in hard thickets. Now
the wood is dark
with old pleasures.

The poem certainly has a “surreal” quality about it. But surrealism is a form of Modernist expressionism; a “surreal” poem—one that refracts and disassociates expected, conventional images, syntax or grammar—is, at the very least, antithetical to “transparent” language. Read this poem out loud, pausing slightly, as one should, at the end of each line: the pleasures are deeply musical; “The Long River” is, in Pound's term, melopoeic. A poem primarily musical is, of course, a poem formed, to some extent, into an “object” of aesthetic appreciation. Through an imagistic expressionism, Hall has entered a realm of “modern” language.

“Internal” and “external” images dominate the poems from “1966–1969,” and almost all of the poems from “1970–1974.” A number of these are among Hall's best, for example “The Alligator Bride,” “Apples,” “Gold,” and the gorgeous “The Town of Hill”:

Back of the dam, under
a flat pad
of water, church
bells ring
in the ears of lilies,
a child's swing
curls in the current
of a yard, horned
pout sleep
in a green
mailbox, and
a boy walks
from a screened
porch beneath
the man-shaped
leaves of an oak
down the street looking
at the town
of Hill that water
covered forty
years ago,
and the screen
door shuts
under dream water.

The poem—one sentence—is apparently discursive. But the language, intensely heightened by the line lengths and breaks, the space around the couplets, and the “dream water” ending, is what primarily impresses. Hall, here, reminds me of Zukofsky, another poet who masterfully knows how to empty a poem's meaning into its song. Some critics (many of whom admire Hall's “classical” work) refer to Hall's poems from 1958 to 1974 as “deep image.” The notion of “deep image” may apply to poetry less formally inclined than Hall's, but it ridiculously misstates Hall's aesthetic. During these years, Hall imaginatively explored language as a primary poetic activity—emotional effects are achieved, first of all, through verbal formulations. Discourse isn't the primary objective of these poems—although it is often an effect. The poems demonstrate a complicated tension between form as the poem's primary subject, and its other subjects; part of what Hall is doing is inquiring how meanings come through, or don't come through, a poem's language.

Then, during the next three years, in a radical shift, Hall almost completely abandons a “modern” aesthetic. Writing the poems that would be included in Kicking the Leaves, Hall returns to discursive “classical” language. But, again, he also expands his formal range. The switches have explosive effects: the expanding language holds expanding subject matter. The poems “open” into language no one had ever quite seen or heard before from Hall. The formal expansion of discursive language continues with equal, if not more, force into the poems from “1979–1986,” which include poems from The Happy Man.

The variety of the poems from 1975 to 1986 dazzles. On the one hand you have the sensuous, euphonious perceptions of “Twelve Seasons”:

After two weeks of heat pressing on sweetcorn—
haze dropping on hay, opaque air—this morning wakes
cool with a bright wind, and the mountain
clear, Kearsarge blue under transparent
running air, cold rapid energy sharp as pitchforks.
It is morning for fires in the stove,
wood's architecture opening shafts and corridors of fire,
vacancies, gases. It is a day for clearing
rocks from the fields, volunteers, elm saplings.
Tomorrow we eat the body and drink the blood
in the community of the white church
where the day's pleasure occupies a pew beside suffering.

On the other hand, the dark, troubling narrated discourse of “My Friend Felix”:

“Beginning at five o'clock, just before dawn rises
in the rearview mirror, I drive at eighty, along,
all through Texas. I am a pencil extending
a ruler's line to the unchangeable horizon
west as I repeat a thousand quarrels with my wives …”

Or there's the sharp-eyed, memory narration from “Kicking the Leaves”:

This year the poems came back, when the leaves fell.
Kicking the leaves, I heard the leaves tell stories,
remembering, and therefore looking ahead, and building
the house of dying. I looked up into the maples
and found them, the vowels of bright desire.
I thought they had gone forever
while the bird sang I love you, I love you
and shook its black head
from side to side, and its red eye with no lid,
through years of winter, cold
as the taste of chickenwire, the music of cinderblock.

During the time he was writing the groundbreaking “classical” poems of The Happy Man, Hall also began forming together pieces of a poem he'd started in the fall of 1971. The result was Part II of The Happy Man, “Shrubs Burned Away.” Set in the center of The Happy Man, it is a profoundly “modern” poem. Revised and retitled “Shrubs Burnt Away,” the poem becomes Part I of Hall's celebrated next book, The One Day, “a poem in three parts.”

There is really no poem in American poetry quite like it. Taking his “modern” impulse well beyond the “internal” and “external” formal objectification of images, Hall combines multiple voices, rhetorics, and subject matter within ten-line stanzas written in “long-line” variable meters. The poem's narrators are subsumed within competing discourses and subjects. The One Day works on multiple levels, a number of which include, as subjects of aesthetic inquiry, the poem's formal expressions: you can't read the poem without being struck by its complexity and interplays, how meanings “objectify” inside the poem's music. For example, consider this stanza from “Shrubs Burnt Away”:

The world is a bed, I announced; my love agreed.
A hundred or a thousand times our eyes encountered:
Each time the clothes sloughed off, anatomies
of slippery flesh connected again on the world's bed
and the crescent of nerves described itself
in the ordinary curve of bliss. We were never alone;
we were always alone. If we were each the same
on the world's bed, if we were each manikins of the other
then the multitude was one and one was the multitude;
many and one we performed procedures of comfort.

Or this, the third stanza of “Prophecy,” carried over to the fourth:

Men who lie awake worrying about taxes, vomiting
at dawn, whose hands shake as they administer Valium, -
skin will peel from the meat of their thighs.
Armies that march all day with elephants past pyramids
and roll pulling missiles past generals weary of saluting
and past president-emperors splendid in cloth-of-gold,—
soft rumps of armies will dissipate in rain. Where square
miles of corn waver in Minnesota, where tobacco ripens
in Carolina and apples in New Hampshire, where wheat
turns Kansas green, where pulpmills stink in Oregon,—
dust will blow in the darkness and cactus die
before its flowers …

Meanings as overlaid and rich as these simultaneously empty and fill into their own music throughout this masterpiece in which Hall creates an almost infinite depth.

Now, two years after The One Day, we have Old and New Poems. The new poems—if they had been issued as a separate book—would merit the response Kicking the Leaves, The Happy Man, and The One Day received. The “new” poems are distinguished by an astonishing imaginative mix between “classical” and “modern” forms. Hall's range continues not only to broaden, it also deepens; the poems sometimes come right off the page with intensity. One, for example, “Tubes”—written in five parts, composed in syllabics, and combining first and third person ironic narratives—is especially compelling. This is its concluding Part V:

“Of all illusions,”
said the man with the
tubes up his nostrils,
IVs, catheter,
and feeding nozzle,
“the silliest one
was hardest to lose.
For years I supposed
that after climbing
exhaustedly up
with pitons and ropes,
I would arrive at
last on the plateau
of Walking-level-
forever-among-
moss-with-red-blossoms,
or the other one
of Lolling-in-sun-
looking-down-at-old
valleys-I-started-
from. Of course, of course:
A continual
climbing is the one
form of arrival
we ever come to—
unless we suppose
that wished-for height
and house of desire
is tubes up the nose.”

The book's final poem, “Praise for Death,” comprised of thirty-eight sectioned cinquaines, is as “modern” as The One Day. By wildly shifting diction and syntax, rhetorical modes, rhythms, multiple meanings and ironies—interspersing personal and historical narratives and textual references to earlier poems—Hall makes the poem sing at an impassioned pitch:

31
… in our mouths: pass, pass away, sleep, decease, expire.
Quickly by shocking fire that blackens and vanishes,
turning insides out, or slowly by fires of rust and rot,
the old houses die, the barns and outbuildings die.
Let us praise death that removes nails carpenters hammered
32
during the battle of Shiloh; that solves the beam-shape
an adze gave an oak tree; that collapses finally
the seller's roof into his root cellar, where timber sawn
two centuries ago rots among the weeds and saplings. Let us
praise death before the house erected by skill and oxen.
33
Let us praise death in old age. Wagging our tails,
bowing, whimpering, let us praise sudden crib-death
and death in battle: Dressed in blue the rifleman charges
the granite wall. Let us praise airplane crashes.
We buried thirty-year-old Stephen the photographer
34
in Michigan's November rain. His bony widow, Sarah, pale
in her loose black dress, leaned forward impulsively
as the coffin, suspended from a yellow crane, swayed
over the hole. When she touched the shiny damp maple
of the box, it swung slightly away from her …

Multiply this intensity and depth imaginatively at least ten times and you get some idea of the poem's cumulative power.

Then, there is—befitting a poet acutely aware of the tensions between “classical” and “modern” poetries within himself and within the art—“This Poem.” Its powers resemble Stevens's “The Plain Sense of Things” and “The Planet on the Table.” “This Poem” not only captures the central imaginative impulse of Hall's old and new poems, but also expresses, as only Donald Hall can, exactly what a Modernist poem at the end of the century is:

1
This poem is why
I lie down at night
to sleep; it is why
I defecate, read,
and eat sandwiches;
it is why I get
up in the morning;
it is why I breathe.
2
You think (and I know
because you told me)
that poems exist
to say things, as you
telephone and I
write letters—as if
this poem practiced
communication.
3
One time this poem
compared itself to
new machinery,
and another time
to a Holstein's cud.
Eight times five times eight
counts three hundred and
twenty syllables.
4
When you require it,
this poem consoles—
the way a mountain
comforts by staying
as it was despite
earthquakes, Presidents,
divorces, frosts.
Granite continues.
5
This poem informs
the hurt ear wary
of noises, and sings
to the weepy eye.
When the agony
abates itself, one
may appreciate
arbitrary art.
6
This poem is here.
Could it be someplace
else? Every question
is the wrong question.
The only answer
saunters down the page
in its broken lines
strutting and primping.
7
It styles itself not
for the small mirror
of its own regard—
nor even for yours:
to fix appearance;
to model numbers;
to name charity
“the greatest of these.”
8
All night this poem
knocks at the closed door
of sleep. “Let me in.”
Suppose all poems
contain this poem,
dreaming one knowledge
shaped by the measure
of the body's word.

IV

No other poet of Donald Hall's generation has written with Hall's breadth in both “classical” and “modern” poetic languages. Only Hall has imaginatively embodied—only Hall has ambitiously probed—the depths of the borderlines between these languages.

Old and New Poems shows that Hall's imaginative tensions and ambitions evolved over time. He has been—perhaps inevitably—misread. But, with Old and New Poems and The One Day, the work need not be misread in any reductive way. Imaginatively, Hall, like Yeats and Stevens, discovered the depth of his aesthetic in his fifties. We see this in no other poet of his generation: most (including many who received more acclaim in their thirties and forties) by their fifties, and into their sixties, have confined themselves—often with embarrassing results—to writing out of decades-old formal and substantive modes. Hall has, and continues to have, what the best always have, the imaginative capacity, to paraphrase Montale, to break the language continuously into the art of poetry.

Notes

1. Donald Hall, The Weather for Poetry: Essays, Reviews and Notes on Poetry, 1977–1981 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1982), p. 352.

2. Sigurd Burckhardt, “The Poet as Fool and Priest,” ELH: A Journal of English Literary History, Vol. 25, No. 4 (December 1956), pp. 279–98.

3. Cited in J. M. Ritchie, Gottfried Benn: The Unreconstructed Expressionist (London: Oswald Wolff, 1972), pp. 103–4.

4. Cited in Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), p. 25.

5. Cited in Rachel Hadas, Form, Cycle, Infinity: Landscape Imagery in the Poetry of Robert Frost and George Seferis (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985), p. 31.

6. An Interview with Donald Hall,” The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall, ed. Liam Rector (Santa Cruz, CA: Storyline Press, 1989), p. 135.