Isn't it "A poem as lovely as a tree"? (Speaking as one of those memorizing
grade-schoolers, and a good thing too, I think now, at least when it comes
to lyrics....) But thanks for the pointers toward _The Fighting 69th_ and
the Davenport essay, the title of which sounds made to order--C
P.S. Finally printed out _your_ "Lyric/Anti-Lyric" essay, Doug, as I find it
so hard to read on-screen now, and it too looks "marvelous" (more anon on
that & this).
on 10/20/02 10:46 AM, Douglas Barbour at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> The Joyce Kilmer appearance I mentioned is in The Fighting 69th (1940). I
>> doubt if Kilmer is known outside the US, where he is remembered for
>> "Trees," which begins: "I think that I shall never see/ A poem beautiful
>> as a tree." It goes downhill from there. Kilmer died in WWI. Thereafter
>> several generations of US schoolchildren had to memorize the poem. A rest
>> stop on the New Jersey Turnpike is named after him, as well as a
>> scattering of schools.
>
> About which poem & poet, Guy Davenport has a marvelous essay in that
> wondrous book, The geography of the Imagination.
>
> Doug
>
> Douglas Barbour
> Department of English
> University of Alberta
> Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
> (h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
> The blank page
> as merely an interval or
> an intrusion. We could not rescue it
>
> nor could we huddle, as if the page were
> big enough.
> Kathleen Fraser
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