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The Collected
Poems of James Agee |
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James
Agee is best-known these days as a prose
stylist, (in books like The Morning Watch,
A Death in the Family and Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men), as well as for his
intelligent and incisive film criticism, (in 1944,
W.H.Auden described his column The Nation as 'the
most remarkable regular event in American journalism
today'). Music-lovers may recall him as the author
of the short autobiographical piece, Knoxville:
Summer of 1915, which Samuel Barber sets in his
piece of the same name, and some may reflect that
perhaps the finest song composed in North America
in the 20th Century was based upon a piece of
prose, rather than a poem. |
Yet Agee was a fine poet, albeit one who only
published one volume (the startling Permit
Me Voyage, of 1934) in his lifetime. This
work is included in The Collected Poems,
along with the later poems, (composed between
1933 and 1950), a 'Poem in Byronics' entitled
John Carter, in which Agee attempts 'to bring
back into poetry a sense of dramatic and narrative
(as well as lyrical) vigor and resourcefulness
which now, for the most part, is found at its
best in prose' and a motley selection of 'Verse',
including political and occasional poems, alternate
versions of sonnets included in Permit Me
Voyage, dramatic sketches, fragments and
epistolary pieces. As a whole, the book testifies
to Agee's restless nature: a short lyric from
Carmina Burana becomes a marvellous piece of 20th
Century vernacular, pithy squibs and political
satire sit easily next to tender and lyrical sonnets,
the various fragments hint at projects that Agee
was too restless, or too preoccupied with other
business, to see through.
Yet this is what makes The
Collected Poems so interesting.
Agee may have abandoned poetry, though he never
abandoned the lyrical qualities that poetry had
taught him. He had been precocious student, possessed
of the learning and subtle ear to which many of
his contemporaries only pretended, but he may
well have come to feel that his own gifts - an
accomplished formalism, a rhetorical gift comparable
with that of the great Elizabethans, a visionary
piety - were out of step with the times. In later
life, he devoted his gifts to fiction, and wrote
at least one of the finest books of the last century,
('For as long as fiction is read,' says Jayne
Anne Phillips, 'James Agee's A Death in the
Family stands as an American masterpiece.
There is no stronger, more moving document in
our literature.') Yet his poetry should not be
forgotten: beautiful, formal, daring, it stands
out as the work of a true original, and it deserves
more attention than current fashions permit. |
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