Do we still have college literary stars? Young people whom a large swath of the school acknowledges as someone to read, someone to follow, someone already accomplishing high things, with springs in their heels to reach even higher? F. Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton, Thomas Wolfe at Chapel Hill, even Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin. (In one of the most spectacular mismatches of topic and literary talent, Hawthorne would interrupt his fiction-writing to pen the official campaign biography of his classmate, Franklin Pierce, for the 1852 presidential election — because the debts we owe our college friends last through life.)

But the model of the college star may be Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943), whose literary career at Yale seems unmatched. When the Sun ran his “American Names” as Poem of the Day this past August, we remarked how quickly he seemed to fade from American literary awareness in the decades after his death. The author of “John Brown’s Body,” “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” even “The Sobbin’ Women” (the story developed into the musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”): Benét’s name had seemed something to conjure with. Until, by the 1960s, it didn’t.

But it was while he was at Yale (even though his classes were interrupted by civilian service during World War I) that Benét dominated the Yale Literary Review and the imagination of such classmates as Thornton Wilder. After college, he would build up for the school the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and Yale University Press. In “Young Adventures” (1918), he included four “Campus Sonnets” he had written while at school. (Yale was impressed enough to give him a master’s degree, using his published poetry in lieu of a thesis.)

“Talk,” one of these Campus Sonnets, is a good example of what college had seemed to those who did well at it. The Shakespearean sonnet (rhymed abab cdcd efef gg, with a not-entirely earned Petrarchan break between the opening octave and the concluding sestet) is very much a young man’s poem: The casual joy of young friendship allows indulging a sweet nostalgia for what is not yet in the past.

Talk
by Stephen Vincent Benét

Tobacco smoke drifts up to the dim ceiling
From half a dozen pipes and cigarettes,
Curling in endless shapes, in blue rings wheeling,
As formless as our talk. Phil, drawling, bets
Cornell will win the relay in a walk,
While Bob and Mac discuss the Giants’ chances;
Deep in a morris-chair, Bill scowls at “Falk,”
John gives large views about the last few dances.

And so it goes — an idle speech and aimless,
A few chance phrases; yet I see behind
The empty words the gleam of a beauty tameless,
Friendship and peace and fire to strike men blind,
Till the whole world seems small and bright to hold —
Of all our youth this hour is pure gold.

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.