Poems Split from Granite

By the simple expedient of picking top poets and giving them a useful chunk of cash, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry has established itself in the relatively short span of 16 years as probably the most highly regarded of U.S. literary awards. Since 1948, when a distinguished jury stirred a furor by awarding the initial prize to Ezra Pound,* the list of Bollingen winners has amounted to a virtual roll call of U.S. poetic merit. Among them: Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Conrad Aiken, William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke. After the 1962 award to Robert Frost, the frequency of the prize was cut to every two years, but the prize money doubled to $5,000. Now the first poet to win the enriched Bollingen has been announced: the relatively unknown Horace Gregory, 66.

Civilized Barbarians. Gregory is a difficult but rewarding combination: a poet of classical, almost Roman temperament who speaks in a modern voice. Milwaukee-born, Gregory concentrated on Latin and English literature at the University of Wisconsin, published translations of Catullus at the beginning of his writing career, and went back to translating in the past decade with satisfying selections from Ovid. He taught at Sarah Lawrence for 26 years until sickness forced him to retire in 1960. His first original poems were sketches and dramatic monologues of working-class New Yorkers just as the Depression began, and though his vision has become more complex, he has continued to be characteristically a poet of 20th century urban alienation, of "the straight, the narrow city, careless goddess" and "the civilized barbarians of the street," where even the oldest inhabitants must make the odd, damning admission, "Yes, I live here: I'm a stranger here myself."

The marriage of classical mood and modern idiom at the heart of his work has not proved easy for Gregory: his lifetime output numbers fewer than 100 poems, none of them long. But at its best, the combination demonstrates consuming intelligence and sinewy strength. In his own phrase, his art can be "fire that flames upon an iron tree," and his poems are often

Gifts grown from moist grasses, split

Granite, or from difficult places where

No life seems to stir.

Strong Music. The life that stirs in his lines--even in the rare love poems or the many graveyard tributes to the dead--often seems a creation of the proud will, not the passions. But for the careful ear there is strong music, cool and casually regular. Gregory is a highly professional craftsman who has chosen to work mostly in silver and pewter and dull bronze, rarely in gold. His muse is a plain girl, easily overlooked in flashy company--but the eye wanders back to her, for she has perfect skin, fine bones, a direct, grey gaze and a clear mind.

*Who was then still in a Washington, D.C., insane asylum, subject to possible trial for treason because of his wartime broadcasts for Mussolini. The Bollingen Prize, established by Financier Paul Mellon in 1945, at that time was administered by the Library of Congress, was shortly moved to the Yale Library.

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