Poetry
Updike published eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his first book The Carpentered Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009). The New Yorker published excerpts of Endpoint in its 16 March 2009 issue. Much of Updike's poetical output was recollected in Knopf's Collected Poems (1993). He wrote that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form." The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike was such a well-known novelist, his poetry "could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of "epigrammatical lucidity." His poetry has been praised for its engagement with "a variety of forms and topics," its "wit and precision," and for its depiction of topics familiar to American readers.
British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for the metaphysical quality of his poetry and for his ability "to make the ordinary seem strange," and calls Updike one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry. Reading Endpoint aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found "another, deeper music" in Updike's poetry. He finds that Updike's wordplay "smoothes and elides itself", and has many subtle "sound effects." John Keenan, who praised the collection Endpoint as "beautiful and poignant", notes that his poetry's engagement with "the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him." It is possible that the literary establishment was unwilling to concede that a writer could do both poetry and fiction well.
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Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the worldso that the moment of intense turning seems still and universalall are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (19131980)
“Thus all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy, When I am convincd of any principle, tis only an idea which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.”
—David Hume (17111776)