The death of Richard Eberhart last week, at the biblical age of 101, severed one of our last remaining links with the heroic age of modern poetry. With the exception of Stanley Kunitz, who is now poetry’s last centenarian, Eberhart’s contemporaries long ago passed into textbook and legend: he was five years younger than Hart Crane, three years older than W.H. Auden. Two poetic generations have already come and gone since Robert Lowell flourished; but Eberhart was old enough to have been Lowell’s teacher, at St. Mark’s preparatory school in the 1930s. Eberhart published his first volume of poems, “A Bravery of Earth,” in 1930, and qualified for a career-defining “Collected Poems” as long ago as 1960. His most famous work, “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment,” is one of the best American poems to emerge from World War II:

You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.

One of the ambiguous gifts of a very long life is that you survive all your eulogists. Eberhart’s obituaries have dutifully mentioned all the honors he reaped in his long career – he won all three of the major prizes in American poetry, the Pulitzer, the Bollingen, and the National Book Award – but inevitably they have no quotes from the poets who grew up with him, who felt his influence and evolved in response to his achievement. Eberhart appears in cameo roles in many biographies of 20th-century poets – most recently, in the newly published “Collected Letters” of Robert Lowell, where the disgruntled student baits his former teacher for “becoming a celibate in a fancy boarding school” – but has never been the subject of a full-scale biography of his own. Oddly, now his obituaries too leave him slightly off center stage, a presence without a personality or intimate context.

This seems ironically appropriate for a poet who, thanks to his style and subjects, was never really in the mainstream of American verse. Born in Austin, Minn. in 1904, Eberhart earned his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth and went on to study at Cambridge in the late 1920s, at a time when that university was a mecca of modernism: I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, and William Empson were among his teachers and classmates. Yet Eberhart, after a few feints at the period’s trendy neo-Metaphysical style, quickly settled into a resolutely unfashionable Romanticism, to which he remained true for the rest of his writing life. (He also led several other lives: as a naval gunnery instructor in World War II, an executive in a floor-polish business after the war, and finally a professor at Dartmouth, where he taught starting in 1956.)

In the 1930s, when irony and pessimism were the fashionable modes, Eberhart did not hesitate to make lofty spiritual claims for great poems: “They put you in love with life. You become identified with eternal relationships. A sweet religious essence may fill you … You mate with the changeless.” In fact, the spirit of Eberhart’s poetry could be called Transcendentalist: almost all of his best poems treat the fear and acceptance of death in terms not very different from “Thanatopsis.” William Cullen Bryant reminds the reader that “Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim / Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, / And, lost each human trace, surrendering up / Thine individual being, shalt thou go / To mix forever with the elements.” This is exactly the message of one of Eberhart’s most famous poems, “The Groundhog,” where “mixing with the elements” is dramatized:

In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he: my senses shook,
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.

The poem has the moral seriousness, but also the linguistic awkwardness and inflation, that define Eberhart’s style. Rather like Stephen Spender, Eberhart’s taste for old-fashioned rhetoric and full-throated emotion often betrays him: the number of gauche, inflated, or simplistic poems in his oeuvre is too high to allow him the status of major poet. The cruel disparity between poetic passion and poetic achievement was something Eberhart himself knew and reckoned with, as in “Fate’s Election”: “Poets who flew into nothingness, / I remember them, their names are forgotten, / They leaped into truth as into high clouds. …”

Fortunately, Eberhart’s late work shed many of those early vices. In his poems of the 1950s and after, he became more concrete and conversational, returning to his usual large themes – mortality, transience, and the consolation of nature – with a comfortable plainness. Even if it does not reach the heights of some of his contemporaries’, Eberhart’s body of work offers enough pleasure and truth to make it a durable achievement. He provided his own best eulogy in the remarkably prescient poem “The Interrogator”:

As the last leaf on the tree
Will you say something about the great one?
I object to being the last leaf.
And he was not all that great.
But the fact is that you are the last one.
The others have all gone into the world of night.
I cannot bear an arbitrary burden.
I am who I am, as was the great one.