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Featured
Book
The Collected Poems of James Agee |
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.
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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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