MORGAN, (George) Frederick

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 25 April 1922. Education: St. Bernard's School, New York, 1927–35; St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire, 1935–39; Princeton University, New Jersey, 1939–43, A.B. 1943. Military Service: U.S. Army Tank Destroyer Corps, 1943–45: Staff Sergeant. Family: Married 1) Constance Canfield in 1942 (divorced 1957), six children (two deceased); 2) Rose Fillmore in 1957 (divorced 1969); 3) Paula Deitz in 1969. Career: Founder, with Joseph Bennett and William Arrowsmith, and since 1947 editor, The Hudson Review, New York; chair of the advisory council, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, 1973–90. Awards: Chevalier de l'Orde des Arts et des Lettres (France), 1984. Address: c/o The Hudson Review, 684 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10021, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

A Book of Change. New York, Scribner, 1972.

Poems of the Two Worlds. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Death Mother and Other Poems. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1979.

The River. New York, Nadja, 1980.

Refractions (translations). Omaha, Nebraska, Abattoir, 1981.

Northbook. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Eleven Poems. New York, Nadja, 1983.

Poems, New and Selected. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Poems for Paula. Ashland, Oregon, Story Line Press, 1995.

Other

The Tarot of Cornelius Agrippa. Sand Lake, New York, Sagarin Press, 1978.

The Fountain and Other Fables. Cumberland, Iowa, Pterodactyl Press, 1985.

Editor, The Hudson Review Anthology. New York, Random House 1961.

Editor, The Modern Image: Outstanding Stories from "The Hudson Review." New York, Norton, 1965.

Translator, Seven Poems, by Mallarmé. New York, Christopher Wilmarth, 1981.

Translator, Refractions. Omaha, Nebraska, Abattoir, 1981.

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Critical Studies: "The Shocks of Normality" by Laurence Lieberman, in Yale Review (New Haven, Connecticut), spring 1974; "The Poetry of Frederick Morgan" by Hayden Carruth, in New Republic (Washington, D.C.), 15 May 1976; "Poet's View" by Thomas Lask, in New York Times, 15 April 1977; Chad Walsh, in Washington Post, 22 May 1977; "Recent American Poetry" by Andrew Waterman, in PN Review 8 (Manchester), 1978; interview in New England Review (Hanover, New Hampshire), spring 1979; "Frederick Morgan's 'Tarot'" by Sydney Lea, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), autumn 1979; "To Articulate Sweet Sounds Together" by Alfred Corn, in Washington Post Book World, 2 March 1980; James Finn Cotter, in America (New York), 22 March 1980; "Mother of Pain, Mother of Beauty" and untitled article, both by David Sanders, in Tar River Poetry (Greenville, North Carolina), spring 1980 and spring 1983; "Poems of Imagination and Fancy" by Richard Tillinghast, in Sewanee Review (Tennessee), summer 1980; "Three Poets in Mid-Career" by Dana Gioia, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), summer 1981; in The Reaper 6 (Evansville, Indiana), autumn 1982; C.B. Cox, in Critical Quarterly (Manchester), winter 1982; "Arms and the Muse" by Emily Grosholz, in New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly (Middlebury, Vermont), summer 1983; "Struck by Lightning: Four Distinct Modern Voices" by G.E. Murray, in Michigan Quarterly Review (Ann Arbor), autumn 1983; "Myth, Poetry, and Superstition" and "Varieties of Poetic Experience," both by Jerome Mazzaro, in Sewanee Review (Tennessee), winter 1984 and winter 1988; "Recovering Pieces of the Morgenland" by Robert Schultz, in Virginia Quarterly Review (Charlottesville), winter 1988; "Between Decorum and Abandon" by Robert Richman, in New Criterion (New York), February 1989; "Voyage to an Inner Day" by Daniel Hoffman, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), winter 1989; interview with Frederick Morgan by Michael Peich, in Hudson Review, 51(2), 1998.

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Of the various strains in Frederick Morgan's poetry, two predominate: the legendary-fabulous and the celebratory-consolatory. In addition, he has a number of fanciful and whimsical poems, personal poems in various modes—nostalgic memories, grateful love songs to his wife, companionable conversations with children—and thoughtful poems that explore the natural world and man's place in it.

In its purest form the legendary-fabulous is the mode of The Tarot of Cornelius Agrippa, a set of twenty-two short fables of rogues, sorceresses, magicians, kings, queens, princesses, and other animate and inanimate denizens of fairyland and the tarot pack. The fables are cast as prose poems, but they are in very loose rhythms and the unsophisticated language of children's stories. Indeed, Morgan's images for the imaginative and religious projections of adult sensibility often have the simplicity and naïveté of a child's vision:

Child, you will die; but between that breath and this—
now at this moment, unless you put her off—
eternity outspreads her glittering fields
where animals play and rivers dance in the sun:
mostly invisible to the time-bent mind...

The twenty-first poem of A Book of Change, from which these lines are taken, is in what I am calling the celebratory-consolatory mode. In such poems Morgan is engaged with deep emotional and spiritual issues, here the paradise within, informed by the "glowing, sacred center." Further, he is committed to sharing his insights into life, death, love, time, a spiritualized natural world, eternity, and God in the commendable hope that such insights will help us with our perplexities and sorrows. Given his personal losses, he might well say with Walt Whitman, "I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there," and with D.H. Lawrence, "Look! We have come through!" Many of these poems, however, seem to be conceived less as art than as communication, as ways of sharing joys and sorrows, of stating opinions and attitudes, of asserting faith, hope, and charity (or sexual love). An instructive comparison could be made, for example, between the glittering generalities of the passage just quoted and the poetically charged specifics of the analogous section in William Carlos Williams's "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," where, in the opening of the "Coda," Williams meditates strenuously on the "huge gap / between the flash / and the thunderstroke." Of course Morgan cannot be faulted for not being Williams. It is just that, given the worth of the enterprise, one hopes for more of the poetic development manifested between his first and second books.

One cluster in particular in Poems of the Two Worlds—"The Old Days," "The Priest," "Hideyoshi," and "Maitreya"—has a spare clarity and evocativeness that demonstrate Morgan's mastery of his medium. "Hideyoshi," certainly one of Morgan's best poems, performs the unusual feat of making believable a character in whom love of violence and love of beauty are integrated in the interests of justice and spiritual wholeness. On the one hand, the Japanese warrior-hero of the poem cuts his enemy to pieces; on the other, he makes a flower arrangement out of emblems of war:

So he took a bucket, and his horse's bit
(which he hung by one ring from the bucket-handle)
and rigged them into a flower-holder,
 
then with his bloody sword
cut wild blossoms and grasses
and in an hour's silence
composed a subtle and delicate combination...
 
Those whom he had conquered
he now must judge:
he wished a mind clean-purged
of violence and ardor.

The effect is rather as if one of Yeats's bitter and violent men who "longed" for "sweetness … night and day" ("Ancestral Houses") had somehow, on Morgan's page, completed himself.

—Sally M. Gall