Collected Poems

by James Agee

minor wear to wrapper only previous owners name to endpapers

Genres: Poetry

Mass Market Paperback

First published June 1, 1968

About the author

Noted American writer and critic James Rufus Agee collaborated with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a bleak depiction of rural poverty and posthumously published his novel A Death in the Family (1957).

This author, journalist, poet, screenwriter in the 1940s most influenced films in the United States. His autobiographical work won a Pulitzer Prize.

Life
Born at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six years of age in 1915, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.

Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate.

In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York.

Career
After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage.

In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered.

In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time and, at one point, reviewed up to six films per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. He left to become film critic for The Nation. In 1948, however, he quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, which has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelance in the 1950s, he continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.

Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then extremely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which has since become a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V, for which he actually published three separate reviews, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.

Legacy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th Century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Part 1 is a callow, romantic, religious sensibility. Part 2 is more mature. Part 3 incomplete. Part 4 uneven.

[Jun Kang · Rating 4 out of 5]

In prose Agee seems in line as an inheritor of Whitman and Emerson and a great stylist in his own right. He writes against Emerson in his vision of the self and yet his skepticism doesn't quite reach the lengths of Melville. Where he stands in the American sublime is tricky since his works are hard to categorise. In verse he is much more varied but I'm doubtful if this breadth is to his benefit. He is as erudite as one might expect reading his prose but Agee himself must have known the limitations verse put on his writing. Agee's genius lays in the expansiveness of soul and a moral urgency to being which is glued together by a syntactic freedom which finds its way best in prose. The lyric compression of verse limits Agee’s expressive range. A very early poem, Description of Elysium demonstrates this well. As well as Ann Garner and his early sequence of sonnets. One would not accuse Agee of a lack of emotional intensity.

Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far / alone / Of shadows on the stars.

In his ramblings somewhere Agee states something along the lines that his earlier work was essentially an attempt to revitalise Elizabethan verse to a modern American sensibility. Why Agee had such enormous ambitions like his attempt at Don Juan inspired John Carter is really anyone's guess. He was an undergraduate. There are some loose and modern verses in his later years. But here, Agee wears Crane's influence close.

[Mickey Bits · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll be the first to admit that poetry is far from my favorite genre. Most of it is, admittedly, over my head. No less, this title. I could only slog through a few of the poems, repeatedly reciting aloud several of those. I could not make heads or tails of more than a two or three and finally came to the realization y time is best spent elsewhere.

"A Death in the Family" this was not.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting seeing the perspective of James Agee and how he put his thoughts into words but what he was actually saying made no sense to me. This started to feel like reading a textbook around halfway through and became a struggle to finish.

[John Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

The one volume published in his lifetime featured the best poems, but both his religious wrestlings and love lyrics were worthwhile.

[Lolly]

DNF

[Tinquerbelle]

Poetry anthology.