Poets, Poetics, and Politics: America's Literary Community Viewed from the Letters of Rolfe Humphries, 1910-1969

by Richard Gillman, Michael Paul Novak (Editor)

Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969), in addition to being an outstanding poet, left an impressive trail as a translator, teacher, critic, and editor. But, as Richard Gillman maintains in the introduction to this volume, poetry was the driving force behind these other special skills and interests. Humphries was, Gillman writes, an example of "the total poet. . . . If ever there were poets who did in fact breathe their art, he was one of them."
These letters for the first time illumine Humphries and his achievements. We see him as the mentor to younger poets including Theodore Roethke, providing rare glimpses of poetics and the creative process; the teacher so charmed by horseracing he sometimes "put an exam on the blackboard . . . and then bugged out for the track"; the "literary terrorist" whose criticism Robert Frost never forgot and probably never forgave him for; the translator whose Aeneid prompted W. H. Auden to call it "a service for which no public reward could be too great"; the author of an introduction to Ezra Pound's poems who demanded that a reference to his anti-Semitism be deleted. And so on and on, in all of Humphries' surprising variety and unfailing candor.
Active in America's literary community, Humphries was a friend of many poets and writers, including Louise Bogan, Edmund Wilson, and Roethke. This volume takes on added meaning by completing the published account of the relationships of these four as already told by Roethke, Bogan, and, to a lesser extent, Wilson.
Poets, Poetics, and Politics is set in a period that opened just two years before the birth of Harriet Monroe's Poetry; when it closed, most of the twentieth century's literary giants had died. Also in this time, many writers, Humphries included, dreamed the dreams of communism; his letters on this subject are both informative and absorbing.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rolfe Humphries was my Freshman Humanities professor at Amherst College; he encouraged me in many ways, loaning me Seneca (Thyestes and one other) from his extensive shelves of Loeb in his office down the hall from our classroom. He also chose me and a classmate who would eventually graduate third in our class for a special evening weekly Humanities course with classicists and others. He was less impressed with my verse, but he commented on it with attention even after he moved to Dartmouth and San Francisco. (He also commented on Dartmouth, but mum is the word.)
His comments on Virgil's Aeneid, one of our course readings, included: "Here the translator has taken liberties. Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentis. Strictly...." Of course, he himself was the translator he criticized.
I read his letters with interest, and the biographical intro by Ruth Limmer is revealing. He came under heavy fire during my years at Amherst; students all wanted a "famous poet," not realizing that they had one, one who was perhaps sidetracked by Roethke, unfortunately, because it can be argued that Roethke authored about seven fine poems. But like Robert Herrick, perhaps the best Latin translator in English (Jonson aside) Humphries wrote translations with such ease one forgets Vergil and Juvenal and Martial had no idea of the English language, which they would have considered a barbaric-sounding Northern brutality.

[Hooper Bring]

Roethke called him “one of the best technicians among modern poets”.