Spring Shade: Poetry

by Robert Fitzgerald

In Spring Shade, Robert Fitzgerald brings together all of his previous collections––Poems (1935), A Wreath for the Sea (1943), In the Rose of Time; (1956)––and adds to them two dozen later poems and a generous sampling from the wide range of his translations.

Since his work first appeared in Poetry, Robert Fitzgerald's controlled yet lyric voice, his intimacy with the classic tradition, have gained for him a distinguished reputation as poet and translator. Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1965, Fitzgerald spends a part of each year with his family near Perugia, Italy, where he does most of his writing. He has received many honors in recent years, among them fellowship in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1962) and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963) and the first Bollingen Translation Award (1961) for his Odyssey.

Genres: Poetry

194 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1971

About the author

Until his death in 1985, Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard University. He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 1984 he was named the poet of the Library of Congress. He published four volumes of his own poetry, and translations, with Dudley Fitts, of Alcestis, Antigone, and Oedipus Rex, in addition to his Illiad, Aeneid, and Oedipus at Colonus.

Reviews

[Praveen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Who doubts the fitting key
Who serves another's eye
Whose hand is not his own
Who never thought he won"

'Be the first'. Goodreads told me when I clicked on review. There is no one on this site who has reviewed this book. Do poetry lovers not read Robert Fitzgerald these days?

I read it though, under my self-inflicted poetry onrush.

A big book for a poetry collection and covers important poems of the poet spanning four decades. I loved many here, It gave me a glimpse of American poetry of a specific period, I saw all sorts of poems and it enriched my understanding!

The final part of this collection includes some translations also, as the poet is well known for his translations like 'Passages from Virgil's first Georgic' and ' A Chorus from Sophocles's Oedipus Rex'.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I knew Fitzgerald from his brilliant translations of Homer and Virgil, so I thought I’d give his poetry a crack. It’s some of the most unique verse I’ve read from the modernist era: neither experimental nor traditional; obscure nor simple; modern nor classical. These are the kinds of poems I would write if I had the skills of a poet. He manages to convey striking images with language that is intelligible but not necessarily concrete. There is room for interpretation, and one often gets the sense he is writing just for himself, with inside references galore, but never at the expense of the reader, and without the frustratingly impossible comprehension inherent in the poetry of some of his contemporaries. Excerpts from his translations at the end show how he applied these formulas to craft some of the best translations of ancient verse into English.