The Poet of Cape Rosier

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The New York Sun

The classic Maine farmhouse of the poet Daniel Hoffman sits atop a hill on Cape Rosier, overlooking islands to the east and a lush, now unruly garden of roses and lilies. “Liz kept up the garden,” he told me when I visited him in August, referring to his late wife, the former poetry editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, Elizabeth McFarland.

This was Mr. Hofmann’s first summer in Maine without her, since their marriage almost 60 years ago. Mr. Hoffman dedicated his first book of poems to Mc-Farland in 1954. That book,”An Armada of Thirty Whales,” was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the first of many honors in Mr. Hoffman’s long career, which included a stint in 1973–74 as U.S. Poet Laureate (or Consultant in Poetry of the Library of Congress, as it was then called).

Mr. Hoffman had met Auden only once before, in New York City: “When I returned to Columbia after the Second World War, I joined the Boar’s Head Society, which was a little group of poets. In those days, colleges didn’t like poets to do anything, so we ponied up the hundred bucks and invited him. … Auden was very late. He shuffled in, looking completely disheveled. He had a tattered manila envelope from which he brought out some wrinkled sheets of poems that we’d recently read of his in the New Yorker, and these he read.”

In Auden’s introduction to “An Armada of Thirty Whales,” he praises Mr. Hoffman’s description of the natural world, from which we are increasingly cut off in a technological age.Throughout his career, Mr. Hoffman has returned to the landscapes and seascapes of Maine as backdrops for one of his recurring themes: “the contrast between the stability and the self-sufficiency of the natural world and the destructiveness of the human world.”

One such poem,”The Seals in Penobscot Bay,” interposes among seaside fauna a Navy destroyer on patrol, as a Ulysses-like narrator listens for artillery fire:

And I wished for a vacuum of wax to ward away all those strange sounds, yet I envied the sweet agony of him who was tied to the mast, when the boom, when the boom, when the boom of guns punched dark holes in the sky.

A later poem, also set in Maine,”The Hermit of Cape Rosier,” describes the primitive abodes of a local character named Jarvis Green. In the poem, Mr. Hoffman describes the three places that Green lived, one nothing more than a flimsy lean-to: “Life seems precarious on this hillside, / battering windy breakers, by rot deepgnawed, / uncivil, ashake with joy and awe and wonder / at cragged Borealis / and the empty shell left on the shore.”

Mr. Hoffman had come across the hermit’s shelter while exploring the Cape on horseback: “In the lean-to, when it was still standing, he had penciled on the beams, ‘Jarvis Green, his little house.'” The hermit of Mr. Hoffman’s poem becomes a figure for the poet himself, who (as Auden points out) “while admitting the pains and tragedies of life, … can find joy in life and say so.”

The poem invites comparison with Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” also set in Maine (in nearby Castine) and also featuring a hermit. The comparison, though, is really a study of contrasts. Mr. Hoffman’s focus in his poem moves out from the poet to the objects described, whereas Lowell uses whatever he is looking at as a way of describing his own interior state. “Who has a better sense of the reality of the world,” Mr. Hoffman wondered aloud,”the person who turns it all subjective or the person who sees it in its variety?”

Mr. Hoffman recalls visiting Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick at their house in Castine, where he spent time with Lowell in his study in a barn beside the bay: “It had a wood burning stove and a stove pipe that went 30 feet to the roof, and that heated the place. It was just strewn with his books and papers. He would bring a lunch down there, and so I’d come up at two o’clock in the afternoon, and we would exchange poems. He was destroying his good early poems by turning them into non-sonnets and so on. I would show him what I was working on, and he was ruthless in destroying my poems. He didn’t give anybody else an inch.”

Still, Lowell could be charming, Mr. Hoffman assured me: “What Ian Hamilton’s biography [of Lowell] fails to convey is how much fun Cal could be. He was so witty and so sharp. When he wasn’t having a depression or a madness he was a very nice man, except that everything poured into himself and became part of his poetry. That blocked out a lot.”

In addition to his stunning, heartfelt poems that engage the dramas of the natural world, Mr. Hoffman has written two book-length poems — “Brotherly Love,”about William Penn’s treaty with the Indians; and a novel in verse, “Middens of the Tribe.” He has also written numerous works of criticism, such as “Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe,” and a memoir, “Zone of the Interior,” about his service in World War II. Mr. Hoffman has written that poets in their 70s, such as Yeats, move into the heroic voice, but Mr. Hoffman himself, now in his 80s, seems more attuned to elegy. As he read to me a recent poem penned for his late wife, I thought of his poem “Going”:

See, the shadows join each other as the air turns shadow and the light fails. You are gone, gone into the ghostly light of all my days, of all my hungers only partially assuaged, of all desires which in the rush of hours I reached and stooped to grasp.

When Mr. Hoffman became Consultant in Poetry in the late 1970s, there was talk of extending the term of the appointment, a move which he and several former laureates opposed: “We thought it was a slavish imitation of king-ridden Britain, where of course at that time the laureateship was a lifetime appointment. We also believed that America, having such a diverse culture, shouldn’t have one poet forever. But the alternative is that there are half a dozen Poets Laureate wandering around the lecture circuit.” The upside for poetry lovers, however, is that two Poets Laureate — Mr. Hoffman and the recently appointed Donald Hall — will both be reading from their work at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. Given Mr. Hoffman’s ample gift for bridging our estrangement from the natural world, it should be a fine way to welcome fall.

Mr. Yezzi is executive editor of the New Criterion.

As part of this year’s National Book Festival, Daniel Hoffman will read in the Poetry Pavilion at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 30, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., between 7th and 14th streets. The festival will run all day, rain or shine.


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