11:1 Spring 1957

DONALD HALL

A Man in the City

In 1957, Donald Hall published New Poets of England and America, an anthology he edited with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson; it has been widely regarded as a defense of the academic poetry of the era. Chicago Review was publishing poetry by many of the contributors to this collection (notably Philip Booth, John Hollander, Howard Moss, and William Jay Smith) and had included new work by each of the collection’s editors, even as the journal had promoted formally-innovative work by e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams. Hall himself would soon come to champion new poets who followed the expansive breath of the Williams line. In the introduction to his 1962 anthology, Contemporary American Poetry, Hall complained of 1950s verse, “American poetry, which has always been outrageous—compare Whitman and Dickinson to Browning and Tennyson—dwindled into long poems in iambics called ‘Herakles: A Double Sestina.’ Myth, myth, myth.”* It may come as no surprise, then, that when recently asked to choose among the two poems he published in the Spring 1957 issue, he preferred “A Man in the City” over “Cain.” Hall writes of “A Man in the City” that “it resembles ‘Waiting on the Corners’ and ‘The Three Movements.’” He did not reprint this poem in a subsequent collection.

[DN, 1996]

* Donald Hall, “Introduction,” in Contemporary American Poetry, selected and introduced by Donald Hall (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 29.

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