Word: hodgson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cumulative" poet interested in a flowing effect, Hodgson shuns brilliant images that grasp the eye. His life is the same way. Passersby are shocked at the disrepair of the farm that he has never worked, at the unruly weeds that he lets grow. An alert, clear-eyed man who looks 20 years younger than his age, Hodgson has no time for such practical things ("Time, you old gypsy man, / Will you not stay, / Put up your caravan / Just for one day?"). Says he in his musing, friendly tone: "What we have to consider is the brevity of life." His real...
Hidden Harmony. Poet Hodgson has spent most of his years tapped in on the hidden, coursing harmony of nature that hustling men seem bent on destroying...
What fascinates Hodgson these days is the source of poetry in other tapped-in men. "Where did De la Mare get that line: 'But she walking there was by far the most fair'? It's not manufactured. He was rather like a cup under a sparkling fountain." As he holds out his own cup, Hodgson is constantly "as interested as a blackcap working his way into a stone wall looking for spiders...
Vision of Carnage. Hodgson's latest poetry is filled with an old theme: fury at human cruelty to nature, to animals, to the imagination. In most of his uncompleted The Muse and the Mastiff, this theme is put in the mouth of an ancient wild bear, who seldom has a kind word for any other animal. To Hodgson, cruelty seems to be getting worse and worse in the hands of men ("I see such carnage in the future"). As for what may come to the world that he has broodingly watched from his lonely farmhouse for so many years...
...Personality colours everything he writes," said the London Times Literary Supplement in a glowing front-page review of Hodgson's new book. "It is the most immediately noticeable thing about the book as a whole: a convincing voice." Most poets seem to agree. John Crowe Ransom calls Hodgson's Eve and The Bull "great, wonderful poems that will live forever." But the convincing voice itself speaks alone at the end of a muddy road, where few care to journey. Says the Minerva postmaster, summing up the town's spooky presentiment about its mysterious poet...