The American poet Léonie Fuller Adams has created a work of art in which an old, familiar trope — carpe diem — achieves its measure of unrepeatable life.
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The American poet Léonie Fuller Adams (1899–1988), whose “Poems: A Selection” received the Bollingen Prize in 1954, elicited from critics the sort of vaporous praise that so often attends lyric poetry — largely because its themes are hard to pin down without reductiveness. Babette Deutsch, for example, called her “the poet of light,” which makes Adams sound like a kind of verbal Thomas Kinkade. Such phrases as “shy wonder” attach themselves to her poems, in an effort to explain what it is about them that makes them poems worth reading.
Poets are fond of declaring that there are only five ideas in the entire created universe, and the challenge is to make something of them. This sounds reductive, or even disingenuous, but it may point us to some more productive ways of thinking of, for example, our Poem of the Day.
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