Thank you very much.
I believe the fact is, mainly, that I'm
one of the last remaining of the old timers.
And I owe a great deal to my friend
Louis Untermeyer, who from 1925 to about 1940
there was the great anthologist every couple of years
bringing out a new anthology of current poetry.
And therefore, since he was very generous with me,
giving me access to a captive audience in the colleges, which
before 1940 had turned into also a captive audience
in the high schools.
So I always remember him gratefully.
And I have listed the poems I should like to read,
and a great many of them use a first personal pronoun,
but it doesn't necessarily mean that this is a truthful record
of some experience of mine.
I think there are precious few writers of fiction or poetry
who can possibly rely on merely their own experience
to fill out the work that they were attempting to write.
They have to, if they start with an experience of their own,
they presently see that it's not getting anywhere,
and they have to call in the imagination to enlarge it.
And after three days of strife with it,
they have forgotten that it's their own experience.
They're just trying to think it out in the terms of a fiction.
And so, "The Winter Remembered" the first poem I'm reading,
is I'm sorry to say, not an autobiographical poem.
The young man seems to be in Alaska, or some such place.
This is a sort of a love poem.
Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
possessed me, and were long and loath
at going: a cry of absence, absence, in the heart,
and in the wood the furious winter blowing.
Think not when fire was bright upon my bricks,
and past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter.
I glowed like them, the simple burning
sticks, far from my cause, my proper heat and center.
Better to go forth in the frozen air
and wash my wound in the snows; that would be healing;
because my heart was throb less painful there,
being caked with cold and past the smart of feeling.
And where I walked, the murderous winter blast
would have this body bowed, these eyeballs are streaming.
And though I think this heart's blood froze not fast,
it ran too small to spare one drop for dreaming.
Dear love, these fingers that had known your touch,
and tied our separate forces first together,
were 10 poor idiot fingers not worth much,
10 frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.
But that's what he tells her when he has returned to her.
And so that's another tragic poem.