11:3 Autumn 1957

PAUL CARROLL

Notes on Some Young Poets

During the 1950s, Chicago Review became a forum for cultural criticism, with commentators like Bruno Bettelheim, Hannah Arendt, Kenneth Burke, Erik and Kai Erikson, Leslie Fiedler, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Leon Edel filling its pages. These contributions are too numerous—and each too lengthy—to include in this retrospective issue. We’ve instead chosen to index the way in which one topic of cultural debate at that time—the issue of conformity—inflected discussions of contemporary poetry. Essays like Morse Peckham’s “Emancipating the Executives” and David Riesman’s “The College Student in an Age of Organization” had addressed the business culture of Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. In the Autumn 1957 issue, Nelson Algren said in an interview, “There are all these myths, you know. Our society is full of them: the General Motors myth, the gray flannel suit myth. And the biggest myth of all is that of the gadget, gadgets everywhere, a collection of things: two Fords in the garage, a deep freeze in the basement, and an all-purpose wife in the kitchen.” In the same issue, Paul Carroll, then the Guest Poetry Editor, wrote a brief essay, “Notes on Some Young Poets,” which uses a similar metaphorical vocabulary. Carroll recently reflected on this work:

I was a young poet forty years ago, when I wrote the “Notes,” and I think I was trying to find a family of poets my own age, with whom I could talk, read their poems, and have fun together. All of the poets discussed, I am happy to say, became close friends from whom I learned a lot. Philip Booth’s letter calling me to task for free and easy use of the term “gray flannel poet” struck me as on the money forty years ago; it still does. And he was absolutely right in pointing out that my review neglected to mention Jim Wright. That was rectified a few years later, in the early 1960s, when I was proud to publish his lyrics in Big Table and have Jim as a buddy.

[DN, 1996]

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