Collected Poems 1930-1986

by Richard Eberhart

Winner of the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award, Richard Eberhart is one of America's most respected and acclaimed poets. Collected Poems, 1930-1986 offers a wide selection of poems from a career that has spanned over half a century, incorporating the earlier
Collected Poems, 1930-1976 , plus over fifty additional poems written in the last ten years. Eberhart's poetry, celebrated for its profundity and humanity, has won praise from fellow poets as various as Robert Penn Warren and Dame Edith Sitwell. This collection represents a comprehensive record of
the work of a major American poet.

Genres: Poetry

464 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1988

About the author

In his varied, century-long life, Eberhart was a tutor in the household of the king of Siam (Thailand), the vice-president of his wife's family floor wax company and poet-in-residence at Dartmouth College, N.H. But he was chiefly a poet and teacher, one of the most prominent of the group which came to notice in the years before Wold War II, publishing his first book of poetry, A Bravery of Earth, in 1930.
Eberhart reached the pinnacle of his success in the 1960s and 1970s, when he won the Pulitzer Prize (1966) and the National Book Award (1977) for poetry collections.

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

The early stuff felt absolutely inscrutable - like bad Robert Lowell first drafts. Once the war poetry started, things took a little more shape and felt more focused.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Eberhart is my favorite contemporary poet, and this collection of all his published poems over a fifty-six year period is worth the read. There are a few weak poems, but they are limited to Eberhart's later career, and he later made up for them in his splendid volume, Maine Poems. Eberhart believed in the old Greek idea of the "divine madness" of the poet, and that what arose from the creative impulse did not require revision--thus much of his poetry is his original draft of the work. His poetry deals with universal themes--nature, God, childhood, growing up, and death--and though it skirts the border of over-abstraction, his poems manage, for the most part, to maintain their connection to the concrete world of experience. The anthology includes Eberhart's justly famous 1934 poem, "The Groundhog," and his 1944 poem, "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment." My personal favorite, concerning the loss of childhood, is "If I Could Only Live at the Pitch that is Near Madness." In this poem, childhood is "violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility," yet that stage is transcended when adulthood intervenes, when "....a realm of complexity came / Where nothing is possible but necessity / And the truth waiting there like a red babe."