Robert Kern: On "For Love"

Despite the fact, however, that Creeley, . . . speaks everywhere in his statements on poetics of the poem as a self-determining activity, of the poem that realizes itself in the poet's literal act of writing, it should also be clear that this is an ideal characterization of the text and of the creative process, and as such not often or at least not immediately accurate to what Creeley achieves in his actual poetic practice . . . .

Shelley Cox: On the Black Sun Press

…. Started in 1927 by Harry and Caresse Crosby (neé Polly Jacobs) Crosby, well-to-do young expatriates living in Paris, the Black Sun Press was created to publish its founders’ maiden (though not especially maidenly) attempts at verse in beautifully bound, hand set books. Dissatisfied with two earlier volumes, the Crosbys found Roger Lescaret, a "master printer" whose previous works had been primarily funeral notices, to print Harry’s poems in a fine edition.

Shelley Cox: "Harry's Black Sun"

As a teenaged ambulance driver on the French battle fields in World War I, Harry Crosby had narrowly escaped death, but in a sense, found himself dead inside. To fill the void, he began to evolve a bizarre personal religion, based on a conventional sun-worship coupled with his own idea of a prepared, not random death. These two themes were fused in his image of a black sun, a sun of madness and death, which demanded a "sun-death" at a specified time so that the soul might ascend into the sun.

Geoffrey Wolff: On Crosby’s "Sun"

… As an object of worship the sun is various and slippery, and in his rush toward a coherent system of belief and symbolic representation, Harry confused unity with totality, so that he attempted to absorb within his belief every aspect and atom of the sun that man in his wisdom or silliness had ever found cause to venerate. The sun – all-seeing eye, blinding light, source of life, killer of Icarus and Phaethon, masculine principle, creative principle, godhead and the eye of the godhead – is at once more comprehensive and a paradigm of ambiguity.

On Tattoo

"Tatto" has a complex origin. It was originally one of a series of entries in a commonplace book that Crosby arranged as "Shadow of the Sun" around the summer or fall of 1927. When he decided to reshape these into passages that more closely resembled diary entries, he set aside a few pieces that seemed unpromising as diary material – such as entry number 17 on page 5 of the typescript of "Shadow of the Sun." This was retranscribed as a separate text and included among the pieces assembled for the volume entitled Torchbearer and published posthumously in 1931.

Theo Steinmann: On "anyone lived in a pretty how town"

In his poem...E. E. Cummings cumulates different kinds and levels of rhythm in order to suggest the complexity of superimposed sensuous and mental impressions. The most striking pattern is obviously the revolution of the seasons, which is indicated by the rotating list of their names. With each of the abstract terms the poet associates a natural phenomenon characterizing the particular season on the sensuous level of human experience so that one may stand emblematically for the other: sun -summer; moon -autumn; stars - winter; rain - spring.

Nell Nixon: On "anyone lived in a pretty how town"

Cummings’ most important structuring devices in this poem are refrains and repeated grammatical patterns. Two of the refrains are strings of four nouns, the first series referring to the seasons ("spring summer autumn winter," line 3, then those same words in a different order in lines 11 and 34); and the second series refering to more specific natural phenomena, all related to the sky ("sun moon stars rain" in lines 8 and 36, and a variant order of these nouns in line 21). Another refrain, "with up so floating many bells down" (line 2) is repeated exactly in line 24.

Subscribe to