He dared

This is the final chapter of my adventure that began with the discovery that my library owned Howard Nemerov's annotated Advanced Review Copy of May Sarton's book of poetry, The Land of Silence and continued with my journey to Special Collections to look at it.

The next step was to see if Nemerov wrote and published a review of The Land of Silence. Since it was published in 1953, I tried a search of the MLA and LION databases but wasn't surprised to not find it.

Then I pulled out my textbook from Reference class, Reference and Information Services by Bopp and Smith, which sent me to a couple of indexes to book reviews. I learned something important about our reference collection at that point--reviews of books and other media are shelved separately from the rest of the indexes, even though the catalog gives no indication that is so. I was on my way to the Reference Desk to ask about them when I spotted them.

My answer was in the Book Review Digest. Nemerov did, indeed, publish a review of The Land of Silence in the September 1954 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Washington University owns that in print, in a bound volume for 1954 in the basement of the library.

It's a negative review, using her own poem, "Poets and Rain," against her. From the review:

And when, at the height, she says, "I stand, rapt with delight though deaf and blind, / And speak my poem," it is difficult not to agree that this or something like this is exactly the trouble.

The review is clever. I have no basis to judge the poetry. My problem with poems is that I usually don't understand them. That holds true for most of Sarton's poems, including the one that sent me on this journey, "Because What I Want Most is Permanence." Perhaps, I am like Nemerov in this. He complained about one of Sarton's poems that it "vastly puzzled my literal head." I did, like Nemerov, understand and appreciate the poem, "Humpty Dumpty." So, perhaps, there is hope yet for my poetry reading.

More importantly, since this all began with one of Sarton's memoirs, I am really enjoying Plant Dreaming Deep and, as a result of these blog postings, received a trusted recommendation for Sarton's next, and most famous, memoir, A Journal of Solitude.     #

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