Meet Mr. Hodgson

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson!

(Everyone wants to know him)--With his musical sound And his Baskerville Hound . . .

-T. S. Eliot

Who was Mr. Hodgson? In London, before World War I, Ralph Hodgson was known to a small, bright circle as a Yorkshireman who loved good talk, bred fine dogs and wrote remarkable poetry. He made his living as an editor, newspaper draftsman, publisher of broadsides and chapbooks. But his heart was in his clear, spare, melodic verse about nature. He was 46 when he published the thin volume entitled Poems (1917), which fellow poets promptly ranked as one of the best works of the young century. Then Hodgson went off to teach English literature in Japan, and little more was heard of him.

Those who had thought him long dead were surprised in 1946, when the U.S. National Institute of Arts and Letters gave Hodgson a $1,000 prize, and again in 1954, when Britain's Queen Elizabeth awarded him the Gold Medal for Poetry. Why Hodgson? In London last month came the best answer: a 96-page book entitled The Skylark and Other Poems. It was the second major book published by forgotten Poet Hodgson, 87, in a long life of deeper privacy than most poets ever dream of. Strangest part of his story: for 19 years Poet Hodgson has lived in the U.S. in a shabby farmhouse on the side of a hill near Minerva, Ohio (pop. 3,800).

Damned Strange. Hodgson settled in Minerva for no particular reason: "The birds seemed just as interesting as in England, and I'd never seen a hummingbird. It took my mind." As for the town, six miles from his house, no more than a score of people have set eyes on Hodgson over the years. His only real contact with the world is his mid-fiftyish, cheerful, Ohio-born wife Aurelia, who works as a clerk in the local wax-paper factory. Hodgson did not even come to town some years ago when he had the local newspaper editor privately print a few of his little chapbooks; he sent his corrections by mail.

A "cumulative" poet interested in a flowing effect, Hodgson shuns brilliant images that grasp the eye. His life is the same way. Passersby are shocked at the disrepair of the farm that he has never worked, at the unruly weeds that he lets grow. An alert, clear-eyed man who looks 20 years younger than his age, Hodgson has no time for such practical things ("Time, you old gypsy man, / Will you not stay, / Put up your caravan / Just for one day?"). Says he in his musing, friendly tone: "What we have to consider is the brevity of life." His real work is wonder about the energy of anything that grows, moves, breathes or flies: "I don't try to reconcile anything. It's a damned strange world."

Hidden Harmony. Poet Hodgson has spent most of his years tapped in on the hidden, coursing harmony of nature that hustling men seem bent on destroying:

I saw with open eyes Singing birds sweet Sold in the shops For the people to eat, Sold in the shops of Stupidity Street.

What fascinates Hodgson these days is the source of poetry in other tapped-in men. "Where did De la Mare get that line: 'But she walking there was by far the most fair'? It's not manufactured. He was rather like a cup under a sparkling fountain." As he holds out his own cup, Hodgson is constantly "as interested as a blackcap working his way into a stone wall looking for spiders."

See an old unhappy bull, Sick in soul and body both, Slouching in the undergrowth Of the forest beautiful, Banished from the herd he led, Bulls and cows a thousand head.

Vision of Carnage. Hodgson's latest poetry is filled with an old theme: fury at human cruelty to nature, to animals, to the imagination. In most of his uncompleted The Muse and the Mastiff, this theme is put in the mouth of an ancient wild bear, who seldom has a kind word for any other animal. To Hodgson, cruelty seems to be getting worse and worse in the hands of men ("I see such carnage in the future"). As for what may come to the world that he has broodingly watched from his lonely farmhouse for so many years, Poet Hodgson limits himself to

Three-and-a-half words only:

Last days of Pomp . . .

"Personality colours everything he writes," said the London Times Literary Supplement in a glowing front-page review of Hodgson's new book. "It is the most immediately noticeable thing about the book as a whole: a convincing voice." Most poets seem to agree. John Crowe Ransom calls Hodgson's Eve and The Bull "great, wonderful poems that will live forever." But the convincing voice itself speaks alone at the end of a muddy road, where few care to journey. Says the Minerva postmaster, summing up the town's spooky presentiment about its mysterious poet: "Oh, he's a brilliant man all right. But such a funny fella. He just sits out there and writes and writes."

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