Over the past four decades, Wendell Berry has been one of the most prolific writers in America, averaging around a book each year. Much of this output has been in the realm of poetry, for which he has been honored with the T.S. Eliot Award, the Aiken Taylor Award, the John Hay Award, and other...
Readers of Chronicles already know that David Middleton is an extraordinarily accomplished poet. For much of the rest of the reading world, unfortunately, he is a well-kept secret. Living in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and teaching at Nicholls State University, he is far removed from the centers of literary power and influence. Even if that were not...
Walter Sullivan entered Vanderbilt University in 1941 as an 18-year-old freshman. Two years later, he left during World War II to join the Marine Corps. He returned in 1946 to finish his degree in English and left again in 1947 to pursue an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with Robie Macauley...
In 1989, Russell Kirk recalled browsing through the library at Michigan State College as an “earnest sophomore” over 50 years earlier. It was there that he happened upon Donald Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan. “It was written eloquently,” Kirk notes, “and for me it made coherent the misgivings I had felt concerning the political notions...
Even in that prehistoric time before television, Robert Alphonso Taft seemed an unlikely leader of men. Looking like a small-town grocer, he spoke in what one admirer conceded was a “whiney Midwestern voice.” When trying to pose as a deep-sea fisherman, Taft once allowed himself to be photographed in a boat that was visibly tethered...
In the Introduction to his classic anthology of Fugitive verse, William Pratt writes: “Modern American poetry abounds in individualism, but two groups of poets have affected its course profoundly.” He is referring, of course, to the Imagists and the Fugitives. Nearly a century after the Imagists first gathered in London in 1909, I wonder what...
“Poetry is a northern man’s dream of the South.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Last of the Belles” In the summer of 1933, Southern Agrarian poet Allen Tate and his friend Marxist literary critic Malcolm Cowley visited various Civil War landmarks in northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky. After being photographed shaking hands in front of the...
If constitutional liberties are as old as the republic itself (older if you include the tradition of English common law), violations of those liberties are just as old. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson threw their political opponents in jail, Andrew Jackson pursued a policy of genocide against this continent’s original inhabitants, and Abraham Lincoln unleashed...
“Beware the people weeping / When they bare the iron hand” —Herman Melville, “The Martyr” It is one of the most famous photographs of the nineteenth century: Alexander Gardner’s picture of four hooded figures dangling from a gallows in the old federal penitentiary in Washington, D.C. on July 7, 1865. On that sweltering afternoon, about...
Peaceful Valley is a bucolic residential neighborhood in Clemson, South Carolina. The middle-class homeowners who live there are not land speculators hoping to turn a profit. Many are like Kathleen Dickel, a 50-year-old high-school German teacher, who owns a two-story contemporary house with a deck surrounded on two sides by deep woods. Kathleen stained the...
The story of their first meeting has been told so many times that it has become part of the folklore of modern Southern literature. One day, during the fall of 1924, Robert Penn Warren stopped by Kissam Hall on the Vanderbilt campus to visit his friend and classmate Saville Clark. With Clark was his new...
“The ‘Tycoon.'” —J.G. Nicolay and John Hay (Secretarial nickname for President A. Lincoln) In the foreword to Brother to Dragons , Robert Penn Warren writes “historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth...
“Poetry is the Devil’s wine.” —St. Augustine In his prophetic poem “The Silence of the Poets,” Dana Gioia imagines a time in the not too distant future when poetry will be a completely lost art. “A few observers voiced their mild regret / about another picturesque, unprofitable craft / that progress...
In January 1996, Norman Podhoretz delivered a self-congratulatory eulogy for neoconservatism in a lecture before the American Enterprise Institute. In addition to giving himself and his cohorts credit for the recent successes of the American right, Podhoretz boasted that “thanks to the influence of neoconservatism on the conservative movement in general, the philistine indifference to...
The Southern Classics Series is a new venture of J.S. Sanders and Company. John Stoll Sanders and his series editor M.E. Bradford are systematically resurrecting worthy titles that have disappeared from the pages of Books In Print. In so doing, they are making a valuable statement about the Southern tradition in American literature. I purposely...
David Pryce-Jones: Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir; Ticknor & Fields; New York. A Chime of Words: The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith; Edited by Edwin Tribble; Ticknor & Fields; New York. Logan Pearsall Smith: All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections and Aphorisms; Ticknor & Fields; New York. Leslie Fiedler once observed that “in our day,...
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Grioux; New York. Louis Auchincloss: Exit Lady Masham; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. In the opinion of Tom Wolfe, “the introduction of realism into literature… was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology. It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude.”...
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Louis Auchincloss: Exit Lady Masham; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. In the opinion of Tom Wolfe, “the introduction of realism into literature…was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology. It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude.” If...