SMITH, William Jay

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Nationality: American. Born: Winnfield, Louisiana, 22 April 1918. Education: Blow School, St. Louis, 1924–31; Cleveland High School, 1931–35; Washington University, St. Louis, 1935–41, B.A. 1939,M.A. in French 1941; Institut de Touraine, Tours, France, 1938; Columbia University, New York, 1946–47; Wadham College, Oxford (Rhodes Scholar), 1947–48; University of Florence, 1948–50. Military Service: U.S. Naval Reserve, 1941–45: Lieutenant. Family: Married 1) the poet Barbara Howes in 1947 (divorced 1965), two sons; 2) Sonja Haussmann in 1966, one stepson. Career: Assistant in French, Washington University, 1939–41; instructor in English and French, 1946–47, and visiting professor of writing, School of the Arts, and acting chairman, Writing Division, 1973–75, Columbia University; instructor in English, 1951, and poet-in-residence and lecturer in English, 1959–64, 1966–67, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Writer-in-residence, 1965–66, professor of English, 1967–68 and 1970–80, and since 1980 professor emeritus, Hollins College, Virginia. Consultant in poetry, 1968–70, and honorary consultant, 1970–76, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; lecturer, Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, 1975; Ful-bright Lecturer, Moscow State University, 1981; poet-in-residence, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, 1985–88. Editorial consultant, Grove Press, New York, 1958–60; poetry reviewer, Harper's, New York, 1962–66; editor, The Journal of Literary Translation, New York, 1973–89. Democratic member, Vermont House of Representatives, 1960–62. Awards: Young Poets prize, 1945, and Union League Civic and Arts Foundation prize, 1964 (Poetry, Chicago); Alumni citation, Washington University, 1963; Ford fellowship, for drama, 1964; Henry Bellamann Major award, 1970; Loines award, 1972; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1972, 1995; National Endowment for the Humanities grant, 1975, 1989; Gold Medal of Labor (Hungary), 1978; New England Poetry Club Golden Rose, 1979; Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, 1982; Camargo Foundation fellow, 1986; Médaille de Vermeil, French Academy, 1991; René Vásquez Díaz prize, Swedish Academy; Pro Cultura Hungarica medal, 1993. D.Litt.: New England College, Henniker, New Hampshire, 1973. Member: Member, 1975, and vice president for literature, 1986–89, American Academy of Arts and Letters. Agent: George Nicholson, Sterling Lord Literistic Inc., 65 Bleeker Street, New York, New York 10012. Address: 63 Luther Shaw Road, Cummington, Massachusetts 01026, U.S.A., and 52–56 rue d'Alleray, 75015 Paris, France.

Publications

Poetry

Poems. New York, Banyan Press, 1947.

Celebration at Dark. London, Hamish Hamilton, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1950.

Snow. New York, Schlosser Paper Corporation, 1953.

The Stork: A Poem Announcing the Safe Happy Arrival of Gregory Smith. New York, Caliban Press, 1954.

Typewriter Birds. New York, Caliban Press, 1954.

The Bead Curtain: Calligrams. Privately printed, 1957.

The Old Man on the Isthmus. Privately printed, 1957.

Poems 1947–1957. Boston, Little Brown, 1957.

Two Poems. Pownal, Vermont, Mason Hill Press, 1959.

A Minor Ode to the Morgan Horse. Privately printed, 1961.

Prince Souvanna Phouma: An Exchange Between Richard Wilbur and William Jay Smith. Williamstown, Massachusetts, Chapel Press, 1963.

Morels. Privately printed, 1964.

Quail in Autumn. Privately printed, 1965.

The Tin Can and Other Poems. New York, Delacorte Press, 1966.

A Clutch of Clerihews. Privately printed, 1966.

Winter Morning. Privately printed, 1967.

Imaginary Dialogue. Privately printed, 1968.

Hull Bay, St. Thomas. Privately printed, 1970.

New and Selected Poems. New York, Delacorte Press, 1970.

A Rose for Katherine Anne Porter. New York, Albondocani Press, 1970.

At Delphi: For Allen Tate on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, 19 November 1974. Williamstown, Massachusetts, Chapel Press, 1974.

Venice in the Fog. Greensboro, North Carolina, Unicorn Press, 1975.

Song for a Country Wedding. Privately printed, 1976.

Verses on the Times, with Richard Wilbur. New York, Gutenberg Press, 1978.

Journey to the Dead Sea. Omaha, Nebraska, Abattoir, 1979.

The Tall Poets. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Palaemon Press, 1979.

Mr. Smith. New York, Delacorte Press, 1980.

The Traveler's Tree: New and Selected Poems. New York, Persea, 1980; Manchester, Carcanet, 1981.

Oxford Doggerel. Privately printed, 1983.

Collected Translations: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese. Minneapolis, New Rivers Press, 1985.

The Tin Can. Roslyn, New York, Stone House Press, 1988.

Journey to the Interior. Roslyn, New York, Stone House Press, 1988.

Plain Talk: Epigrams, Epitaphs, Satires, Nonsense, Occasional, Concrete and Quotidian Poems. New York, Center for Book Arts, 1988.

Collected Poems 1939–1989. New York, Scribner, 1990.

American Primitive. Roslyn, New York, Stone House Press, 1990.

Winter Morning. St. Louis, Missouri, Washington University Libraries, 1990.

Ode on the Occasion of the Centennial Ball, 30 January 1991. New York, The Century Association, 1991.

A Toast to James Thomas Flexner on His Eight-Fifth Birthday, 13 January 1992. Roslyn, New York, Stone House Press, 1992.

The Cyclist. Roslyn, New York, Stone House Press, 1995.

The World below the Window: Poems 1937–1997. Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

The Cherokee Lottery: A Sequence of Poems. Willimantic, Connecticut, Curbstone Press, 2000.

Christmas Card Poems (with Barbara Howes): Lachrymae Christi and In the Old Country, 1948; Poems: The Homecoming and The Piazza, 1949; Two French Poems: The Roses of Saadi and Five Minute Watercolor, 1950—all privately printed.

Artists' Books: Marine, poem in English, with oil on paper illustrations by Julius Baltazar, Paris, Julius Baltazar, 1994; The Pyramid of the Louvre, concrete typewriter poem with collages by Bertrand Dorny, Paris, Bertrand Dorny, 1995; Lily in Autumn, poem in English, with oil on paper illustrations by Julius Baltazar, Paris, Julius Baltazar, 1995; Le Jeune Cyclist (The Cyclist), translated by Sonja Haussmann, with five engravings by Albert Dupont, Paris, L'Inéditeur, 1996; Le Sentier (The Trail), concrete poem translated by Alain Bosquet, with engraving by Albert Dupont, Paris, L'Inéditeur, 1999.

Poetry (for children)

Laughing Time. Boston, Little Brown, 1955; London, Faber, 1956.

Boy Blue's Book of Beasts. Boston, Little Brown, 1957.

Puptents and Pebbles: A Nonsense ABC. Boston, Little Brown, 1959;London, Faber, 1960.

Typewriter Town. New York, Dutton, 1960.

What Did I See? New York, Crowell Collier, 1962.

My Little Book of Big and Little (Little Dimity, Big Gumbo, Big and Little). Riverside, New Jersey, Rutledge, 3 vols., 1963.

Ho for a Hat! Boston, Little Brown, 1964; revised edition, 1989.

If I Had a Boat. New York, Macmillan, 1966; Kingswood, Surrey, World' s Work, 1967.

Mr. Smith and Other Nonsense. New York, Delacorte Press, 1968.

Around My Room and Other Poems. New York, Lancelot Press, 1969.

Grandmother Ostrich and Other Poems. New York, Lancelot Press, 1969.

Laughing Time and Other Poems. New York, Lancelot Press, 1969.

Laughing Time: Nonsense Poems. New York, Delacorte Press, 1980.

The Key. New York, Children's Book Council, 1982.

Laughing Time: Collected Nonsense. New York, Farrar Straus, 1990.

Birds and Beasts. Boston, Godine, 1990.

Big and Little. Honesdale, Pennsylvania, Boyds Mill Press, 1992.

Around My Room. New York, Farrar Straus, 2000.

Plays

The Straw Market, music by the author (produced Washington, D.C.,1965; New York, 1969).

Army Brat: A Dramatic Narrative for Three Voices (produced New York, 1980; Washington, D.C., 1982).

Other

The Spectra Hoax (criticism). Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

The Skies of Venice. New York, Andre Emmerich Gallery, 1961.

Children and Poetry: A Selective Annotated Bibliography, with Virginia Haviland. Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, 1969; revised edition, 1979.

Louise Bogan: A Woman's Words. Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, 1972.

The Streaks of the Tulip: Selected Criticism. New York, Delacorte Press, 1972.

Green. St. Louis, Washington University Libraries, 1980.

Army Brat: A Memoir. New York, Persea, 1980.

Editor and Translator, Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue. New York, Grove Press, 1956.

Editor, Herrick. New York, Dell, 1962.

Editor, with Louise Bogan, The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People. Chicago, Reilly and Lee, 1965; London, Evans, 1967; revised edition, Chicago, Contemporary Books, 1990.

Editor, Poems from France (for children). New York, Crowell, 1967.

Editor, Poems from Italy (for children). New York, Crowell, 1972.

Editor, Light Verse and Satires, by Witter Bynner. New York, Farrar Straus, and London, Faber, 1978.

Editor, A Green Place: Modern Poems (for children). New York, Delacorte Press, 1982.

Editor, with Emanuel Brasil, Brazilian Poetry 1950–1980. Middle-town, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1983; London, Harper, 1984.

Editor, with J.S. Holmes, Dutch Interior: Post-War Poetry of the Netherlands and Flanders. New York, Columbia University Press, 1984.

Editor, with Dana Gioia, Poems from Italy. Minneapolis, New Rivers Press, 1985.

Editor, with F.D. Reeve, An Arrow in the Wall: Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrei Voznesensky. New York, Holt, and London, Secker and Warburg, 1986.

Editor, Life Sentence: Selected Poems, by Nina Cassian. New York, Norton, 1990.

Editor, Songs of Childhood, by Federico García Lorca. Roslyn, New York, Stone House Press, 1994.

Editor, What You Have Almost Forgotten: Selected Poems, by Gyula Illyés. Budapest, Kortárs Kiadó, and Willimantic, Connecticut, Curbstone Press, 1999.

Translator, Scirroco, by Romualdo Romano. New York, Farrar Straus, 1951.

Translator, Poems of a Multimillionaire, by Valery Larbaud. New York, Bonacio and Saul, 1955.

Translator, Children of the Forest (for children), by Elsa Beskow. New York, Delacorte Press, 1969.

Translator, Two Plays by Charles Bertin: Christopher Columbus and Don Juan. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1970.

Translator, The Pirate Book (for children), by Lennart Hellsing. New York, Delacorte Press, and London, Benn, 1972.

Translator, Chairs above the Danube, by Szabolcs Várady. Privately printed, 1977.

Translator, Saga, by Andrei Voznesensky. Privately printed, 1978.

Translator, with Max Hayward, The Telephone (for children),by Kornei Chukovsky. New York, Delacorte Press, 1977.

Translator, with Leif Sjöberg, Agadir, by Artur Lundkvist. Pittsburgh, International Poetry Forum, 1979.

Translator, with Ingvar Schousboe, The Pact: My Friendship with Isak Dinesen, by Thorkild Bjørnvig. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1983; London, Souvenir Press, 1984.

Translator, Moral Tales, by Jules Laforgue. New York, New Directions, 1985; London, Picador, 1987.

Translator, with Leif Sjöberg, Wild Bouquet: Nature Poems, by Henry Martinson. Kansas City, Missouri, Bookmark Press, 1985.

Translator, Collected Translations: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese. Minneapolis, New Rivers Press, 1985.

Translator, with Edwin Morgan and others, Eternal Moment: Selected Poems, by Sándor Weöres. Minneapolis, New Rivers Press, and London, Anvil Press, 1988.

Translator, with Sonja Haussmann Smith, The Madman and the Medusa, by Tchicaya U Tam'Si. Charlottesville, Virginia, University Press of Virginia, 1989.

Translator, Epitaph for Vysotsky, by Andrei Voznesensky. Roslyn, New York, Stone House Press, 1990.

Translator, Poetry, by Nina Cassian. Roslyn, New York, Stone House Press, 1990.

Translator, Christopher Columbus, by Charles Bertin. Roslyn, New York, Stone House Press, 1991.

Translator, Snail, by Federico García Lorca. Privately printed, 1994.

Translator, Berlin: The City and the Court, by Jules Laforgue. New York, Turtle Point Press, 1995.

Translator, with Leif Sjöberg, The Forest of Childhood: Poems from Sweden. Minneapolis, New Rivers Press, 1997.

*

Bibliography: "William Jay Smith: A Bibliographical Checklist" by Timothy D. Murray, Newark, University of Delaware Library.

Manuscript Collection: Washington University, St. Louis; concrete poetry in the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Miami Beach, Florida; the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Special Collections; University of Delaware, Newark; Special Collections, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Critical Studies: "William Jay Smith," in Modern Verse in English, 1900–1950, edited by David Cecil and Allen Tate, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, and New York, Macmillan, 1958; "William Jay Smith," in The Hollins Poets, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1967; "The Lightness of William Jay Smith" by Dorothy Judd Hall, in Southern Humanities Review (Auburn, Alabama), summer 1968; "A Poet Named Smith" by Jean G. Lawlor, in Washington Post (Washington, D.C.), 9 March 1969, "An Interview with William Jay Smith" by Elizavietta Ritchie, in Voyages (Washington, D.C.), winter 1970; "The Dark Train and the Green Place: The Poetry of William Jay Smith" by Josephine Jacobsen, in Hollins Critic (Virginia), February 1975; Children's Literature in the Elementary School, 3rd edition, by Charlotte S. Huck and Doris A. Young, New York, Holt Rinehart, 1976; Children and Books, 6th edition, by May Hill Arbuthnot, Zena Sutherland, and Dianne L. Monson, Chicago, Scott Foresman, 1981; "Ars Poetica: 1 Heartlessness: American Primitive" by James Fenton, in Independent (London), 28 January 1990; "Enter the Dark House" by Henry Taylor, in Michigan Quarterly Review (Ann Arbor, Michigan), 30(4), fall 1991; "Narrowing Our 'Soul-From Soul Abyss': Inward Journeys of Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, and William Jay Smith" by Dorothy Judd Hall, in His 'Incalculable' Influence on Others: Essays on Robert Frost in Our Time, edited by Earl J. Wilcox, Victoria, British Columbia, University of Victoria Press, 1994; by Dana Gioia, in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, edited by Ian Hamilton, Oxford University Press, 1994; "Darkness in the Light Verse of William Jay Smith," in Light, summer 1996, and "William Jay Smith at Eighty: An Interview," in New Letters, 65(3), 1999, both by Robert Phillips; "The Pleasures of Formal Poetry" by Elizabeth Frank, in Atlantic Monthly, September 1998.

William Jay Smith comments:

I am a lyric poet, alert, I hope, as one of my fellow poets, Stanley Kunitz, has put it, "to the changing weathers of a landscape, to the motions of the mind, to the complications and surprises of the human comedy." I believe that poetry should communicate; it is, by its very nature, complex, but its complexity should not prevent its making an immediate impact on the reader. Great poetry must have resonance; it must resound with the mystery of the human psyche and possess always its own distinct, identifiable, and haunting music. Since 1965 certain of my poems have been written in long unrhymed lines because the material with which I have been dealing has seemed to lend itself to this form, which is often close to, but always different from, prose. I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.

*  *  *

William Jay Smith's first book, Poems, announced a poet of exotic subjects, high patina, and exquisite music, a combination suggestive of early Wallace Stevens. Poems such as "The Peacock of Java," "On the Islands Which Are Solomon's," and "Of Islands" transform a seascape of atolls that "brings, even / To the tree of heaven, heaven." Other poems, like "The Barber" and "The Closing of the Rodeo," initiate Smith's satirical rendering of the American commonplace, while "Cupidon" reflects his interest in incremental ballad form and fantasy. This early work seemed a deft performance in the then dominant metaphysical style, but Smith has always sounded a note of his own, his lightness, dexterity, elegance, and wit reflecting not only the prevailing influence of Eliot, Tate, and Ransom but also earlier poets who had influenced them.

During World War II Smith served as a liaison officer aboard a Free French naval vessel, and he began his civilian career as a teacher of French literature at Columbia. He published a distinguished translation of Valery Larbaud in 1955 and of Jules Laforgue in 1956. The qualities of formal versification, precarious poise, and wit in his early verse seem akin to those of Laforgue, the dream work suggestive of Larbaud. Further clues to his own verse are offered in Smith's two critical studies. The Spectra Hoax is an entertaining reconstruction of the successful leg-pull by Witter Bynner and Arthur Davidson Ficke, who not only concocted a fictitious school of poets in 1916–18 but, writing pseudonymously as its members, also begat better poems than when they used their own names and wrote in more conventional styles. The following year Smith's introduction to a selection of the poems of Robert Herrick described that poet as "a master of under-statement [who] knows what to omit," "a perfect miniaturist; nothing is too small for him to notice or too great to reduce in size." These and other occasional essays are collected in The Streaks of the Tulip: Selected Criticism.

Smith's translations and studies of English, French, and American poets suggest the range and sources of his fascination with satire, fantasy, and wordplay, his comprehension of the true seriousness of successful light verse, and his devotion, until his late work, to brief lyrics, conventional forms, aesthetic distance from his subjects, and a burnished surface, as in his little poem "Tulip," which offers "magnificence within a frame." Similar qualities animate his several books of verse for children. He has written, "I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children." One such communication, Typewriter Town (1960), anticipated by several years the vogue for concrete poetry among writers for adults.

These qualities and Smith's characteristic lightness of touch are blended into an unmistakably American idiom in Poems 1947–1957, especially in "Letter," "Death of a Jazz Musician," and "American Primitive":

Look at him there in his stovepipe hat,
His high-top shoes, and his handsome collar;
Only my Daddy could look like that,
And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar.
 
The screen door bangs, and it sounds so funny—
There he is in a shower of gold;
His pockets are stuffed with folding money,
His lips are blue, and his hands feel cold.
 
He hangs in the hall by his black cravat,
The ladies faint, and the children holler:
Only my Daddy could look like that,
And I love my Daddy like he loves his dollar.

Beginning with The Tin Can and Other Poems Smith, like most of the poets of his generation, moved on from the style he had mastered to a new, freer prosody, in which the dark side of experience is presented in a more unmediated way than in poems like "American Primitive," which had enclosed it in a play of wit and form:

O dreadful night!...What
train will come?...What
  tree is that?
   ...a sycamore—the mottled bark stripped bare,
Desolate in winter light against the track, and I
  continue on to the mudflats
By the roaring river where garbage, chicken coops, and
  houses rush
   by me on mud-crested waves,
And at my feet are dead fish—catfish, gars—and there
  in a little inlet 
Come on a deserted camp, the tin can in which the hoboes
  brewed their
   coffee stained bitter black
As the cinders sweeping ahead under a milkweed-colored
  sky along a
   darkening track
    And gaze into a slough's green stagnant foamy
      and know that the way out is never back,
      					but down,
      				    down ...
      			What train will come 
      			   to bear me back
      			across so wide a town?

At least one reviewer of The Tin Can suggested that the hitherto elegant Smith had succumbed to the prosier incantations of Allen Ginsberg. As with Ginsberg, this loose, rolling line makes possible the inclusion in Smith's work of many grubby realities that, like Herrick, he had earlier tended to omit or to transfigure. Smith's sensibility, however, has little in common with the beat bard's, and a likelier point d'origine for these poems is in the free verse and surreal observations of the contemporary by Larbaud. Smith's long, unrhymed line makes possible an amplitude of feeling as well as inclusiveness of subject, and in it he has continued to explore both his descent into the inarticulate and the terrifying ("My voice goes out like a funicular over an abyss, and my hands hang at my sides, clenching the void; / My dreams are filled with bitter oranges and carrots, signifying calumny and sorrow") and his intimations of the unity of all things, as in "The Tin Can," a poem of withdrawal from the world and the resultant gift of vision to the spirit.

Collected Poems 1939–1989 offers a generous selection from Smith's previous books, including a section of his light verse, and a group of poems written since The Traveler's Tree, his last major volume. In "Sitting Bull in Serbia," written in free verse, the old rebel chief, now in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, passes on to "Black George, leader of the Serbian revolt" his defiant vision of "the Earth's Great Spirit." Himself part Choctaw, Smith writes in "The Players" of a band of Seminoles who appear in costumes stolen from an itinerant Shakespearean company to reject a proffered treaty: "There will be no surrender, General. There will be no peace; / only the murderer who waits, only the poetry that kills."

In observance of the indefatigable poet's eightieth birthday a larger volume, The World below the Window: Poems 1937–1997, appeared in 1998, with new poems that address aging, finding little or varying comfort: "The naked mirror man is old and gray … / He'll lean upon a stick within the year; / the fire subsides but still the ashes glow: / to feel so young and yet so old appear" ("The Ironies of Age"). In "Journey to the Interior" the poet "has gone into the forest" where "trees around grow toothpick thin / and a deepening dustcloud swirls about / and every road leads on within / and none leads out." It is a bleakness somewhat assuaged in "The Cyclist," in which, witnessing a fatal accident that recalls the death of another young girl, his daughter, the poet seems to hear her say, "All that turns returns—returns, and is forgiven, understood; / as you approach life's end, you will see / the circle is complete."

The Cherokee Lottery (2000) expands the number of poems in this sequence to eighteen. This is the most ambitious treatment in verse of the dispossession of the Indians since Robert Penn Warren's narrative poem Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983) and Daniel Hoffman's Brotherly Love (1982), on William Penn's treaty with the Lenni-Lenape and their betrayal by his successors. In his memoir Army Brat Smith traces his descent form Chief Moshulatubbe and writes of the influence of his Choctaw heritage on his work:

I like to think that the still center from which I believe my poetry springs has much in common with the reverential attitude of the Native American towards the elements, the sensory and spiritual connection between earth and sky … The visual element in my work may owe something to my Choctaw heritage … I found it reassuring that while I had been brought up on an Army garrison founded as an outpost in the Indian Wars, I had forebears … on the outside and in the enemy's camp.

Smith's poem, dramatizing the forced evacuation of the southern and Midwestern tribes to Oklahoma, is episodic. The Cherokee and Choctaw chiefs appear and speak in their own voices; Sequoyah invents an alphabet, giving writing to the Cherokees; an old Choctaw laments the forced abandonment of his tribe's funeral customs. In other sections we see the Indians through the eyes of others: Tocqueville sees nursing mothers, the old and the sick, uncomplaining, on rafts floating downriver; an army officer witnesses the suffering on the Trail of Tears as, starving, the forced marchers tear apart pumpkins in a field. Interspersed among descriptions are lyrical passages, as in the concluding lines about Sequoyah, whose name is with us yet in "a giant evergreen":

Its rings record lost kingdoms, ancient wars,
through raging fires it stood and bears the scars,
yet climbs the mountainside to touch the stars.

The artists George Catlin and Charles Banks Wilson regard the subjects they drew and painted, Wilson depicting their lingering survivors like "the last pureblood Kaw / … seated in his driveway listening / on earphones to peyote music,"

and now, with no one left to understand his native tongue,
  he told me, "God gave the Kaw this language, so when
  I talk to people, I speak English,
but when I talk to God, I speak his language."

The lottery of the title is the subject of the second poem: "When the Cherokees refused to leave / the state set up a lottery / to rid them of their land." After the drawing by which their land was apportioned to the whites and the tribe ejected at bayonet point,

   no one spoke,
no one cried: only the dogs
   howled as if they alone
could voice the nation's grief …

The final poem, "Full Circle: The Connecticut Casino," is juxtaposed with the Cherokee lottery:

It was with this Casino that the Mashantucket
   Pequot Nation
finally tricked the Great White Father Trickster
or outfoxed the Great White Fox
...
and all the gold stolen from the Cherokees in Georgia
seeming to return now to the Pequots in Connecticut

The poem ends with a vision of "that far-off land / where people speak / only the truth / and where all races live together / in lasting peace and perfect harmony."

The shifting points of view, varied forms, and changing rhythms keep the sequence lively. The complexity of the sequence, which is tragic in feeling, is in its structure, not in its accessible texture. The poems, with all of their sometimes bizarre conjunctions, are yet historically accurate. The Cherokee Lottery is a major work, a dramatic moral reckoning, made vivid in verse, of an injustice in American history.

Over a period of more than sixty years Smith has written a body of work perhaps unrivaled in its range: formal lyrics, free verse meditations, distinguished translations of contemporary and nineteenth-century poets from the French, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian, delightful children's poetry, discriminating criticism, a lively memoir, and the sequence The Cherokee Lottery. What has been constant in Smith's work is his range of tone, embracing the elegant, the absurd, the grotesque, the tragic, and the visionary in verse, whether formal or free, characterized by poise and resonance.

—Daniel Hoffman