In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

I purchased The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees based on Dana Gioa’s essay “The Loneliness of Weldon Kees” in Can Poetry Matter. I was convinced to buy it based on passages like this: Indeed, his best work has an immediacy not found in the early work of any of his contemporaries, except Bishop and Roethke. [...]

I thought this poem by Weldon Kees was interesting, perhaps because of how different his treatment of the subject matter is from a Robinson Jeffers poem (see Jeffers’ November Surf) that I just finished commenting on. LANDS END A day all blue and white, and we Came out of woods to sand And snow-capped waves. [...]

Although the most famous of Kees’ poems, the “Robinson poems,” and, in particular Aspects-of-Robinson/ first reminded me of Eliot’s “J. Alfred Prufrock,” the more I read them the more they reminded me of E.A. Robinson’s “Richard Cory.” So much so, that it made me wonder if Kees didn’t use that title as an allusion to [...]