In July, while looking around for a book to read—a book I would find interesting yet wouldn’t want to keep after reading, I saw on my bookshelves in the storeroom John Keats: The Making of a Poet. By Aileen Ward, published in 1963, this was perfect. It looked like  serious biography, the subject of poetry still holds my interest, and I didn’t think it would be a book I’d like to read twice.

Born in 1795 in London, son of a groom/stableman, Keats was one of the “Romantic era” poets. The last major one to be born and the first to die.  Before reading this, I knew his poetry and read some of it. I have, somewhere upon my over-stuffed bookshelves, a small volume that someone pulled together of best-known works, and a volume of his complete poems.

But I knew little about the man except about his tragic death from consumption at age 25. This book told me much about him. His father was a hard worker who opened a business for stabling the horses of travelers; he died when Keats was 9 and away at boarding school. His mother was a gadfly who quickly remarried upon her husband’s death, left the family for a few years, then returned in time to have Keats nurse her through the final stages of consumption when he was a teenager.

Keats took up the study of medicine and seemed to do well with it. He was at the point of launching into one of the lower-level medical sub-professions when poetry became his main interest. He began to write it and found he could do it. Alas, he fell under the influence of Leigh Hunt, who was roundly disliked by the better known literary critics. Hence Keat’s first poetry book, published in 1817 while he was still planning on a career in medicine, was also denounced by those same critics.

Despite this, Keats laid aside the medical field and took up poetry as his vocation. His long poem, “Endymion,” published and panned by the critics, is not considered a classic. According to Ward, many of his shorter poems were autobiographical, written about this or that person, or place, or event. The most famous of these is “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer”.

But Keats struggled financially, as well as in his health. He never received his full inheritances from his parents and grandparents, never earned much from his published poems, and lived without extravagance.

This biography does a good job of telling all of this, sometimes in almost too much detail. But it does keep moving and did keep my reading. I read about 10 pages a day in my noon reading time, in the sunroom our outside in the woods when the weather cooperated, and finished it in a little over a month.

I found the sources used by Ward and her way of spinning them into the story particularly impressive. Despite how old this is relative to our modern times (Keats died in 1821), it seems she was able to document close to every day of his life: when he wrote which poem and why; where he traveled; who he dined with; what his health was like at the moment. It helped that Keats left an extensive correspondence behind at his death.

I am so glad I saw this book on the shelf and read it. I rate it the full 5-stars. I’ll not read it again and it’s not a keeper. But learning about this little piece of poetic history has acted like a tonic in my reading life.

At some point, I bought a copy of The Palm at the End of the Mind, a collection of Wallace Stevens’ poems. Although it is said to be “selected poems”, it seems to be fairly complete. My paperback copy is 404 pages.

The editor is Holly Stevens, his daughter. She wrote in the Preface, “The poems included in this selection have been chosen to represent my father not only at his best but also in the full range of his imagination. They have been arranged in chronological order, determined from manuscript evidence, correspondence, or date of publication.” Although these are selected, it seems like a complete collection to me.

I’ve known about Wallace Stevens for some time but had read little of his poetry. He has some poems in anthologies that I have leafed through, but if I read any of his, they didn’t make much of an impression on me. Until this collection, that is. I bought this, I suppose, to try to have a more “rounded out” collection of poets’ works. Stevens lived from 1879 to 1955, so was a poet of the 21st Century. I assumed that would make him essentially a free verse poet, that assumption being informed by snippets about him that I had read in magazines or short bios.

Sure enough, that’s what I discovered as I read in this volume.  Almost everything in it is free verse. I’ve made no bones about it that I don’t understand free verse and can’t appreciate it. Thus, it’s no surprise that I didn’t like what I was reading in this book. The first poem seemed pretty good, however, and I read on. Alas, for me it was all downhill from there. I had great difficulty finding enjoyment in most of the other poems.

Heck, I didn’t understand most of them. They seemed to be a series of unrelated and disconnected images. I just skimmed through the book to find an example of this. Virtually every poem has those types of images and language, but I think I won’t quote them here.

So, I gave up with Mr. Stevens’ book. I hate to do that with any book. Before I did I got to page 100, 1/4th of the way through the book, so that I could say I gave it an honest trial.

And, as you can suspect, the book is not a keeper. I hate to break up my poetry collection, but with this one I start the process.

More times than I can think of, I start a book, become bogged down in it, and lay it aside. Or, another book catches my eye and I shift to the other book and set aside the first. Or, the busyness of life and cares of the world get in the way, resulting in my putting the book on the shelf and then forget that I had ever started it.

Such was the case with The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas. Now, this is a book that checks a couple of boxes on my likes list. It’s letters. Readers of this blog know I like to read published letters. It’s about a poet, a poet I knew a little about but whose poetry isn’t my favorite. I don’t remember where I got this book, though I’m pretty sure I picked it up used, though in immaculate condition.

It was more than 20 years ago that I started this book. I remember reading in it, liking it, and then making a presentation from it to Poets Northwest, the local chapter of the Poets Roundtable of Arkansas. That presentation was well received by the group, if I remember correctly.

But I set it aside when life got in the way.

Not long ago I decided that I would, in the interest of dis-accumulation in anticipation of a future downsizing, break up my collection of published letters. Scanning my shelves, I saw this book and decided I would finish it.

Dylan Thomas is an enigma among poets. That is, he is difficult to understand. He was undisciplined in life, unfaithful to his wife,  unrestrained in his appetites, unable to budget and constantly begging money. His poetry doesn’t move me a lot, though some are good. Others who know poetry better than I do, i.e. those considered critics, consider him one of the great poets of the 20th Century.

His letters contain great information. He wrote many begging letters to various friends and patrons, asking for money. In other letters he discusses poetry. Many related to the broadcasts he made on various BBC programs, or scripts for others. It’s hard to explain everything Thomas was into.

I had left off reading about halfway through the book, in the year 1940. The letters are arranged chronologically from around 1932 to his death in November 1953. It includes letters back to his wife, Caitlinn, while he was on trips to the USA. Even though he made a large amount of money from his poetry and prose readings in the US, he was still broke due to overspending. He professed great love in letters to Caitlinn even while having affairs with multiple women in the US.

Reading these letters is sometimes painful. He was constantly dealing with money issues with those who would publish his poems and prose. He sold off his copyrights to make money, only to try to buy them back again. All this is documented in the letters.

If letters are your thing, these are well worth reading. If they are not, of course there’s no point in trying to find this—unless you are a Dylan Thomas lover, that is. Then it is well worth reading. The book printing is also excellent. The letters are well-arranged, and editor intrusions of footnotes and historical inserts are just about right.

I give this book 5-stars. However, it is not a keeper for me. I may go back and re-read some of the early letters, which I barely remember two decades after reading them. But otherwise, out to the sale/donation shelf it goes.

I continue to pull books from this or that shelf, looking for any that seem interesting but which I’m sure I won’t keep. Reading those should be a win-win situation. A bit of enjoyment and decluttering/dis-accumulation at the same time.  The one I chose a couple of weeks ago was an oldish one: Four Ways of Modern Poetry, edited by Nathan A. Scott.

Published by John Knox Press in 1965, I have the Chime Paperbacks edition. Original cost was $1.00, stamped right on the front page. It’s in pretty good condition for its age.

The book looks at four poets: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and W.H. Auden. I’m sure I bought this primarily for Frost, but also secondarily for Thomas. Since I bought this, I have read a little of Stevens, and have liked what I read. I’m still unfamiliar with Auden.

The book, 92 pages, consists of four essays by four different men, each one covering one of the four poets. I found the essay on Steven, by Stanley Romaine Hopper, mostly incomprehensible. I plowed through it but didn’t enjoy it and doubt that I learned much about him. I have a large book of his poetry and will have to get back into that sometime soon.

The essay by Frost was by Paul Elmen. This might have been equally incomprehensible as the first except that I know more about Frost. Elmen’s point is the Frost was a dark poet, not the simple, pastoral New England poet he appears to be. Others have said the same thing. I haven’t decided yet. I enjoy the pretty pictures that Frost’s poems paint, and am happy not to look for darkness beneath the surface.

The Thomas essay was by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. I’ve read a fair amount about Thomas. In fact, on my reading table is A Dylan Thomas Reader, which I dip into from time to time when other books at hand don’t excite me. I also have a book of his letters, which I read half-way through. Thomas’s poetry I don’t really care for, but he is an interesting character. Mills did a good job on explaining Thomas’s place in modern poetry.

The essay on Auden was written by the editor, Scott. It was by far the best of the four. It made me want to read more of Auden’s work, and some critique of those works and some biographical pieces. Alas, I will have to get much further into retirement and to the point where I don’t want to write anything of my own before I do that.

It took me only six or seven sitting to get through this. I consider the time to have been well spent. I won’t recommend it, mainly because I suspect it would be difficult to find a 1965 paperback in whatever bookstore you go into. It’s probably available on-line, from ABE Books or wherever you go for out-of-print books. It is worth reading if modern poetry is to your liking. But for me, I won’t be re-reading it so it is not a keeper. Nope. It’s already on the sale/donation shelves. A good read, but off it goes.

Almost all I know about poetry I learned by myself. A series of secondary school English teachers covered poetry every year, and I’m afraid I was a poor student of it. About all I learned was the names of the major poets, and a little of what era they were in.

One of those names was Edna St. Vincent Millay. I knew of her, but nothing about her.  That changed after I began studying poetry about twenty years ago. I read somewhere (probably Wikipedia) a short bio about her, and read a few of her poems in different anthologies.  Then I picked up a biography of her and read it, telling me something about the woman. Finally, in my library, on my poetry shelf in the storeroom, I found Collected Lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay. This little mass-market paperback belonged to my sister, for she signed it and put her homeroom down. it was published posthumously in 1959. This particular printing was from 1966.

Lots about poetry confuses me. What do they mean by “Lyrics”? They mean lyrical poems, I realize, but how do lyrical poems differ from other poems? I tried to figure that out some years ago and failed to grasp the difference. I do note, however, that this book contains none of Millay’s sonnets. So I reckon sonnets are not lyrical poems. I’m starting to think that lyrical poems are poems that don’t fit into a prescribed form—although I’m sure that’s not right.

No matter. The poems collected in this book run the full length of Millay’s poetic career, from Renascence in 1919 to Huntsman, What Quarry? in 1939 and scattered poems after that up to her death in 1950. She was quite a gal. I won’t go into her background. Let’s just say it’s well worth reading a biography about her.

As to the poems, I have a mixed reaction. I would for sure say she is not among my favorite poets. I had difficulty finding meaning in many of hers. Because of her background, one first attempts to read her poems as autobiographical. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I prefer to assume any poet’s poems are not autobiographical. But so many of hers I just can’t figure out. To keep from glazing over as I read her poems, I read the book slowly, a few pages at a time, over almost a year. Maybe it was more than a year. In hindsight that may not have been the right decision.

I tried to read the poems carefully, not glossing over them. Many I read twice, having come to the end of one and thinking “What did I just read?” Alas, most of the time the second read made little difference. I still had little understanding of the poem.

So my two questions I try to answer in these reviews: Should you read this, and is the book a keeper? Reading poetry is a good thing; Millay is a major poet from the not too distant past; so yes, you should read her. Whether her lyrics taking in isolation from the rest of her work is another question. I think maybe a different of her books is in order.

As to keeping this, that’s a harder question. Or is it? So far, I’ve not sold any of my poetry books. But I have another book of Millay’s poems, one that is more complete than this one. I don’t know that I need two. So, off it goes. I’d return it to my sister but I’m sure she won’t want it. Nope, into the sale/giveaway pile it goes. Goodbye, Edna. See you in another book.