Eight Harvard Poets — Reading Notes

Formal Play and Sonnet Sequences

Several contributors work within strict sonnet forms while subtly breaking their conventions. Cummings’s “Thou in Whose Sword-Great Story” is a conventional Petrarchan sonnet praising Froissart, but his “A Chorus Girl” twists the same form into a portrait of a performer after the curtain falls, ending with “the lintel of defeat.” Hillyer’s “Four Sonnets from a Sonnet-Sequence” and Norris’s “Wherever My Dreams Go” also use the sonnet to frame intimate addresses, often to an absent beloved. The repeated choice of the sonnet—a form associated with love and praise—for poems about loss, war, or disillusionment creates a productive tension between structure and subject.

Recurring Motifs: Music, Death, and the Sea

Images of music and silence appear across the collection. Damon’s “Phonograph—Tango” juxtaposes mechanical sound with a dance of death, while Hillyer’s “To a Passepied by Scarlatti” addresses a Baroque dance form. Norris’s “Of Too Much Song” asks whether the poet, like sedges along a shore, might “die of too much song.” The sea functions as both a literal setting and a metaphor for finality: Dos Passos’s “The Bridge” and Norris’s “Sea-burial” place figures at the water’s edge, and Wright’s “The Room Over the River” suspends a speaker above flowing water. Death is treated not as an abstraction but as a physical presence—in Damon’s “The New Macaber,” a skeleton dances, and Mitchell’s “Lazarus” imagines the risen man waiting “again to die.”

Urban and Pastoral Settings in Tension

The poems frequently shift between cityscapes and natural landscapes, sometimes within a single piece. Dos Passos’s “Salvation Army” places religious fervor on a city street, while his “Night Piece” evokes a quieter, rural darkness. Cummings’s “This is the Garden” offers a pastoral image that is immediately undercut by the poem’s ironic tone. Mitchell’s “From the Arabian Nights” and Poore’s “A Renaissance Picture” reach toward exotic or historical settings, but these are framed by the more immediate, contemporary scenes of Norris’s “Nahant” or Wright’s “A Dull Sunday.” The juxtaposition suggests a generation of poets trying to reconcile their classical education with the modern world they were about to enter—many of them would serve in World War I shortly after this book appeared.

Voices of Doubt and Defiance

A skeptical, sometimes defiant tone runs through many poems. Damon’s “You Thought I had Forgotten” directly challenges a reader or lover, while his “To War” adopts a sardonic stance toward martial glory. Poore’s “The Philosopher’s Garden” and “Cor Cordium” question the value of knowledge and art in the face of mortality. Mitchell’s “A Crucifix” reimagines the cross as a symbol of human victory rather than divine sacrifice, and his “Neith” describes learning “salvation from thy wordless tongue”—a salvation that turns out to be “laughter in the face of doom.” These poems do not offer easy consolation; instead, they insist on the poet’s right to doubt, to mock, and to find meaning in transient beauty.

Because the excerpts represent only a portion of each poet’s contribution, readers should treat individual sequences—like Hillyer’s sonnet sequence or Poore’s linked poems—as potentially developing arguments or narratives not fully visible here. The volume rewards attention to its internal echoes: a phrase or image in one poet’s work may reappear, transformed, in another’s. Reading across the eight sections reveals a shared vocabulary of longing, irony, and formal ambition that marks these early efforts by writers who would later take very different paths.

I keep circling back to those Harvard students, their sonnets and posturing, because I remember my own undergraduate poems—breathless, convinced I’d found death’s true name. Then, later, I discovered The Union: Or, Select Scots and English Poems — Key Ideas to Explore, and felt that same odd comfort: strangers, centuries apart, all whispering about music and the city’s pull. A quiet kinship, reading alone.