Donald Hall: What Makes a Poet Great?

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Donald Hall is well-known as the greatest poet of the USA. He is the most important poet in the lineage of Robert Frost. Memoirist, short story writer, essayist, dramatist, critic, and anthologist as well as poet, he is one of the most resourceful and prized writers of his generation. “In the history of literature,” wrote Donald Hall in a prose work, “Poetry Notebook,” issued in the Seneca Review (1982), “Most poets have been so drenched in their own writing that they have used it without regarding what they were making.” This he regarded “The Tradition,” offering “models of magnitude that we have the audacity to take as calculates for our attempts.” (Stitt, 1991) Articulating rather various regard, poet Alice Notley stated that “There’s only one poetic custom,” and “the moment I enter this tradition or this history…its entire nature changes.” (Gale, 2008)

Hall believes this uphill tendency has been fueled by interpretations – at colleges, fictional fiestas, and other locations – which have become gradually more popular because of the 1950s. “The poetry interpretation used to be an unusual occasion,” he clarifies. “Even well-known lyricists such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were infrequently asked to read their verses.” But listening to a poem read aloud “can be like reading it many times. Reader has a favor to get into the poem, an actual body, a definite voice, and a sequence of gestures.” (Stitt, 1991)

The voice is heard in Hall’s poetry, and it is almost Frost-like with its tangible diction and plain language. It is a voice that is recognizable with loss and the sequences of the original world, a voice that is both attractive and reliable.

Some of that reliance may come from the reality that Hall has been formed by the New Hampshire countryside. He has dwelled on his family’s farm in Danbury, N.H. since he left a tutoring place at the University of Michigan in 1975 to concentrate on writing. (Gale, 2008)

Mo poets do not start rewriting as early as Hall did, but Hall’s early performance of rewriting has turned to be a marked trait of his work. “I do not issue anything I haven’t worked over 100 times,” he states. “There’s a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.” (Stitt, 1991) Here is an instance of the rewritten poem. The original version, unfortunately, is not available, as the author has never published such versions:

This year the poems came back when the leaves fell.

Kicking the leaves, I heard the leaves tell stories,

remembering, and therefore looking ahead, and building

the house of death. I looked up into the maples

and found them, the vowels of bright desire.

I thought they had gone forever

while the bird sang I love you, I love you

and shook its blackhead

from side to side, and its red eye with no lid,

through years of winter, cold

as the taste of chicken wire, the music of cinder block.

In an appraisal of Hall’s latest Selected Poems, Billy Collins stated in his article for 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.”

His respects entail two Guggenheim associations, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver medal, a Lifetime Achievement reward from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poems. Hall also provided as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989. In December 1993 he and Jane Kenyon were the laureates of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, “A Life Together.” In June 2006, Hall was taken on the Library of Congress’s fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. (Stitt, 1991)

Regarded as one of the key American poets of his generation, Donald Hall’s works discover a desire for the more rural past and reproduce the poet’s abiding admiration for nature. Although Hall increased an early achievement with his 1955 verses compilation Exiles and Marriages, his latest poetry has usually been regarded as the best of his career:

when my father had been dead a week

I woke

with his voice in my ear

I sat up in bed

and held my breath

and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again

I would put on my coat and galoshes

Often contrasted positively with such authors as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall applies simple, direct language to suggest surrealistic descriptions. Moreover to his poetry, Hall has created a respected collection of prose work that entails essays, fiction, plays, and books for children. Hall, who lives on the New Hampshire farm, is also admired for the anthologies he has corrected and is a well-known teacher, speaker, and reader of his own verses. (Gale, 2008)

Hall’s traditional posture notified the powerful anthology he edited with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, New Poets of England and America (1957). This book exhibited the educational taste than in fashion and stood in rigid resistance to modern inventive work such as that collected three years later in Donald Allen’s collection The New American Poetry. These two books were broadly regarded as defining an unbridgeable gulf in American poetry.

Hall finally changed his viewpoint, and his later collection, Contemporary American Poetry (1962; revised 1972), embraced a number of poets, such as John Ashbery, who would have been painful in the previous volume. Nevertheless, Hall went on to be regarded as a spokesman for the more traditional part of American poetry. (Gale, 2008)

It is up to the audience to “hear” the Eagle Pond Farm. Hall provides his personal voice and the voices of his fellows to those who will listen and those who wish to live in a location improved by the past. In the poem “Maple Syrup” Hall remembers coming across his grandfather’s last jar of syrup that he and Jane Kenyon divided:

dip our fingers

in, you and I both, and taste

the sweetness, you for the first time,

the sweetness preserved, of a dead man

in the kitchen, he left

when his body slid

like anyone’s into the ground.

“I have contributed nothing to make the situation better. I’m a bad reviewer. Either I condemn to hell or I sound like a blurb. I remember when I took the job at Michigan instead of Harvard and other Ivy League jobs, I thought that in the large amorphousness of Ann Arbor I would be freer to concentrate on poetry. It was true. If I had been at a tighter, more elitist place, I might have felt pressured to write book reviews instead of the self-generated pressure to write poems.” He once noted in his interview, and once more confirmed his geniality. (Stitt, 1991)

Hall joined along with New Hampshire and the American custom of rural writing. He wrote from within and out of this custom. He does not ranch, and he does not confront readers to adopt hatchet and plow up, like Wendell Berry, but unlike lots of transplants to the county, he joins with a cavernous family custom. Like Maxine Kumin and Wes McNair, he marks deeply into the New Hampshire countryside to provide approaches about living in contemporary times that may only be found through lived understanding in towns like Wilmot. Hall’s trend of pastoral Modernism flourishes, like that of Horace or Wordsworth or Frost, in stabs at the border of the territory.

If most Americans presuppose that rural Yankee culture refused and decayed in the 20th-century ‑ historian Joseph Conforti states that the picture and idea of Yankee New England wandered northward into smaller communes in the front of social and financial reform and the attack of expansion and commercialization in the 20th century ‑ Hall states that much of value has endured. He does not drag some genuine Yankee cottontail out of a concealed meadow, or determine stone-age Yankee ethnic groups, for this is alongside the point.

At Eagle Pond Farm, Yankee receptivity is not a frail traditional, for it endures through ingenuity, satirical alteration, and contemporary awareness tempered by the chronological recall and confidence that conservation matters because of community issues.

Annotated bibliography

Gale. Contemporary Authors Online. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2008. Web.

It is stated, that Donald Hall’s works discover a craving for the rural history and replicate the poet’s enduring respect for environment. In considering themes and images for both his fiction and his poetry, Donald Hall often turns various lores for inspiration.

According to Jack Riemer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, this “lore” represents the author’s aim “to give continuity to that tradition in a contemporary form.” Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and in spite of early aggravations had his first verse issued at age sixteen. He was a member at the prominent Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference that same year. From Exeter, Hall entered Harvard University, where he studied classes alongside other poets-in-training, among them Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery; he also attended with Archibald MacLeish for a year. In his time at Oxford University, Hall turned to be one of the few Americans to win the popular Newdigate competition for his verse “Exile.”

This article emphasizes the geniality of Donald Hall, and describes his the most prominent achievements in the sphere of literature and poetry.

Hall, Donald. Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale. Web.

The article is mainly concentrated on the bibliography of Donald Hall. New England writer Donald Hall is regarded to be a foremost poet in the heredity of Robert Frost. Memoirist, short story writer, essayist, dramatist, critic, and anthologist as well as poet, he is one of the most adaptable and valued writers of his generation. Donald Hall’s works discover a longing for the more pastoral past and reproduce the poet’s enduring respect for natural world. Although Hall increased an early achievement with his 1955 poetry compilation Exiles and Marriages, his more current poetry has normally been considered as the best of his career.

The authors of the article provide the facts for clear understanding of the factors, which impacted David Hall’s poetry. It is stated, that his distinction from the other poets split New England poets of Hall’s age group into two very diverse groups. Poets such as Hall, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Lowell chased the instance of Robert Frost in forming poems according to customary forms and meters and in celebrating fundamentally fixed values and standards.

Stitt, A. P. Donald Hall. The Art of Poetry No. 43, Iss. 120, 1991.

This is another article on the matters of Donald Hall’s life and literary work. It states, that Donald Hall likes getting to work early, and so all the interview sessions at the farm started at about six A.M. Interviewer and interviewee were aways sitting in cozy chairs with the cassette recorder on a table between them. The interview touches upon all the possible spheres of Hall’s life and creativity.

This is the review from the Paris interview, where Hall speaks about the establishment of the English, Media and Linguistics Dept. at MacQuarie University; gratitude of Australian English as a separate form; regulations of English teaching in NSW; in general in the UK; the notion of teaching English in schools; approaches towards language difference; Birmingham Universities for the 1960s; his work in Paris; language teaching in Rwanda and Iran; methodologies and impacts on language in the 1970s and 1980s; conventional teaching contrasted to learner centered approaches; the future of language teaching; insights of language changing continuously; language teaching in Australia; Asian states offering English courses.

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Donald Hall: What Makes a Poet Great?

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