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Their Ancient Glittering Eyes

4.33 of 5 stars 4.33 · rating details · 30 ratings · 5 reviews

"Great poetry, " wrote Donald Davie in the New York Times, reviewing an earlier version of this wonderful portrait gallery, "is a record of sanity maintained and achieved . . . I suspect that Donald Hall has written a modern classic." Young Donald Hall was fortunate to know and study with some of the great poets of the century, and to conduct interviews with others. This b...more "Great poetry, " wrote Donald Davie in the New York Times, reviewing an earlier version of this wonderful portrait gallery, "is a record of sanity maintained and achieved . . . I suspect that Donald Hall has written a modern classic." Young Donald Hall was fortunate to know and study with some of the great poets of the century, and to conduct interviews with others. This book, enlarged, enriched, and rewritten, lights up the elder poets it describes with freshness of approach and clarity of vision. Robert Frost, behind his performing mask, was not only kinder than his biographers admitted, but more egotistical than legend allowed. Hall catches him in both attitudes. To cope with Dylan Thomas on one of his sprees was as harrowing for young Donald Hall - and as productive of hangovers - as for anyone else. Hall got to know T. S. Eliot first through an act of inadvertent copyright violation, but relations soon and profoundly improved. Archibald MacLeish, at ease in the White House and the Library of Congress, was somewhat awkward among his students, while Yvor Winters, terror of the critical quarterlies, evinced depths of unexpected tenderness. Marianne Moore, unpredictable and zany, proved to be a source of wonder and delight amid the knickknacks in her Brooklyn apartment. Ezra Pound, interviewed with great pains in his old age in Italy, could barely bring himself to speak of his past acts and opinions. Hall's portraits of these giants of twentieth-century American poetry not only depict them as they were in their lives, but illuminate their work and their attitudes to it, born of diverse sources of talent, sympathy, and understanding. Other books on the great poets of our century havebeen either scholarly or strictly biographical. This book speaks of poets as poets, evoking W. B. Yeats's great poem "Lapis Lazuli": . On all the tragic scene they stare./ One asks for mournful melodies; / Accomplished fingers begin to play./ Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, /(less)

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Published August 1st 1993 by Mariner Books

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Dec 19, 2008 Renée rated it 5 of 5 stars

*Their Ancient Glittering Eyes* derives its title from a Yeats poem, which seems apt, as the chapters of this book are the journey of one poet through the interactions he had with other poets. Hall's chapters, which read like self-contained essays, take us through a literary landscape of the 20th Century, with its principle characters being poets such as Frost, TS Eliot, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, etc. In many ways, it reads like an account of a poetry apprenticeship, but Hall's accounts are...more

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Jan 20, 2008 Deborah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets

U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall presents in this book fascinating essays about his encounters and friendships with great poets. Some of them, such as Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, were his teachers. Others he occasioned to meet in college, when he would serve as host to visiting poets. I found the most interesting chapters to be those about poets he came to know principally through interviews he conducted for literary magazines...more

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Nov 18, 2012 Joel rated it 4 of 5 stars

In Their Ancient Glittering Eyes former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall recollects his meetings and interviews with some of the giants of modernist poetry, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound. He reflects on his experience of their work and on their lives. This is not a biography, nor is it journalism. Donald Hall makes no attempt to give an objective or comprehensive account of these writers. He gives his own opinions and experiences and feelings and reactions to...more

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Apr 28, 2011 Beverly rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Donald Hall met all of these Poets & I met Donald Hall & that has me dumbstruck- Thank you , Tristan.

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Sep 17, 2009 Micha rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A friend gave me this book and I love it.

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Jun 30, 2008 Richard rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm not going to finish this. It's one of those books you can dip into when you want, and I've gotten through the major leaguers Hall writes about, and I'll dip later. This is high tone literary gossip, and highly opinionated critique. Pound, Eliot, and Frost all get the treatment, and the book is a fun read just for those three. The gossip is really interesting. Donald Hall, the author, was a US poet laureate.

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About Donald Hall

Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at the age of sixteen—the same year he had his first work published. He earned a B.A. from Harvard in 1951 and a B. Litt. from Oxford in 1953.

Donald Hall has published numerous books of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1...more Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at the age of sixteen—the same year he had his first work published. He earned a B.A. from Harvard in 1951 and a B. Litt. from Oxford in 1953.

Donald Hall has published numerous books of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); The Painted Bed (2002) and Without: Poems (1998), which was published on the third anniversary of his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon's death from leukemia. Other notable collections include The One Day (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination; The Happy Man (1986), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Exiles and Marriages (1955), which was the Academy's Lamont Poetry Selection for 1956.

In a review of Hall's recent Selected Poems, Billy Collins wrote in the Washington Post: "Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines."

Besides poetry, Donald Hall has written books on baseball, the sculptor Henry Moore, and the poet Marianne Moore. He is also the author of children's books, including Ox-Cart Man (1979), which won the Caldecott Medal; short stories, including Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); and plays. He has also published several autobiographical works, such as The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (2005) and Life Work (1993), which won the New England Book award for nonfiction.

Hall has edited more than two dozen textbooks and anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America (1990), The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes (1981), New Poets of England and America (with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, 1957), and Contemporary American Poetry (1962; revised 1972). He served as poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1953 to 1962, and as a member of editorial board for poetry at Wesleyan University Press from 1958 to 1964.

His honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Silver medal, a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. Hall also served as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989. In December 1993 he and Jane Kenyon were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, "A Life Together." In the June 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress's fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He lives in Danbury, New Hampshire.(less)

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The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon

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