WEISS, Theodore (Russell)

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Nationality: American. Born: Reading, Pennsylvania, 16 December 1916. Education: Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, B.A. 1938; Columbia University, New York, M.A. 1940. Family: Married Renée Karol in 1941. Career: Instructor in English, University of Maryland, College Park, 1941, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1942–44, and Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1944–46; assistant professor, 1946–52, associate professor, 1952–55, and professor of English, 1958–66, Bard College Annandaleon-Hudson, New York; lecturer, New School for Social Research, New York, 1955–56; visiting professor of poetry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1961–62; lecturer, New York City YMHA, 1965–67; poet-in-residence, 1966–67, professor of English and creative writing, 1968–77, Paton Professor, 1977–87, guest, Institute for Advanced Studies, 1986–87, and since 1987 emeritus professor, Princeton University, New Jersey. Hurst Professor, Washington University, St. Louis, 1978; lecturer for the United States Information Service in Southeast Asia, Hungary, and Denmark, 1979–80; poet-in-residence, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 1982; professor of English, Cooper Union, New York, 1988. Since 1943 founding editor, Quarterly Review of Literature; member, Wesleyan University Press Poetry Board, 1964–70; general editor, Princeton University Press Contemporary Poets series, 1974–78. Since 1964 honorary fellow, Ezra Stiles College, Yale University. Awards: Ford fellowship, 1953; Wallace Stevens award, 1956; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1967, 1969; Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, 1974; Brandeis University Creative Arts award, 1977; Guggenheim fellowship, 1986–87; Shelley memorial award, 1989; PEN Club Special Achievement award for publishing, 1997; Williams/Derwood award for poetry, 1999. D. Litt.: Muhlenberg College, 1968; Bard College, 1973. Address: 26 Haslet Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Catch. New York, Twayne, 1951.

Outlanders. New York, Macmillan, 1960.

Gunsight. New York, New York University Press, 1962.

The Medium. New York, Macmillan, 1965.

The Last Day and the First. New York, Macmillan, 1968.

The World before Us: Poems 1950–1970. New York, Macmillan, 1970.

Fireweeds. New York, Macmillan, 1976.

Views and Spectacles: Selected Poems. London, Chatto and Windus, 1978.

The Aerialist. Princeton, New Jersey, Pilgrim Press, 1978.

Views and Spectacles: New and Selected Shorter Poems. New York, Macmillan, 1979.

Recoveries. New York, Macmillan, and London, Collier Macmillan, 1982.

A Slow Fuse: New Poems. New York, Macmillan, 1984.

From Princeton One Autumn Afternoon: Collected Poems. New York, Macmillan, 1987.

A Sum of Destructions. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Selected Poems: 1950–1995. Evanston, Illinois, Triquarterly Press, 1995.

Recording: Theodore Weiss Reads from His Own Work, CMS, 1975.

Other

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Realist on Parnassus. Privately printed, 1940.

The Breath of Clowns and Kings: A Study of Shakespeare. New York, Atheneum, and London, Chatto and Windus, 1971.

The Man from Porlock: Engagements 1944–1981. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1982.

Toward a Classical Modernity and a Modern Classicism. Portree, Isle of Skye, Aquila, 1982.

Editor, Selections from the Note-hooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York, New Directions, 1945.

Editor, with Renée Weiss, Contemporary Poetry. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1975.

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Manuscript Collection: Princeton University Library, New Jersey.

Critical Studies: By Harry Berger, in The Fat Abbot (New Haven, Connecticut), summer-fall 1961; Richard Howard, in Alone with America, New York, Atheneum, 1969, London, Thames and Hudson, 1970, revised edition, Atheneum, 1980, and in Perspective (St. Louis), 1969; Helen J.F. de Aquilar, in Parnassus (New York), 1980; interview, with Colette Inez, in First Person Singular edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Princeton, New Jersey, Ontario Review Press, 1983; Willard Spiegelman, in Parnassus (New York), fall-winter 1984.

Theodore Weiss comments:

Many years ago, in A Controversy of Poets, I wrote, "I am concerned in a proudly snippety time with the sustained poem." Though I have written many short poems since then, I see no reason to disagree with the above sentiment. In that statement I went on to regret "poetry's surrender of immense sectors of the world to prose, most of all the novel …" In the last fifteen-twenty years, I am happy to say, more and more poets have turned to the narrative and the dramatic, including the dramatic monologue. I continue to believe that "poetry can and must renew its older, larger interest in people and a world past the poet's self-preoccupations."

In "A Note" introducing my collected poems I stressed my sense of one's work as a growing, changing, yet fundamentally single thing. I said (here I quote the bulk of "A Note"):

Since writing for me has constituted something like a work in progress and since with time poems may show weaknesses as well as new possibilities, I have attended to these developments. Revision has been an increasingly integral part of my writing life. One early long [book-length] poem here was some twenty years in the making. A making which has continued in this latest round. Thus reverberations, deliberate and inevitable, sound throughout the volume. For, to some deep degree, each new poem is a reinforcement and realization drawn up out of and for its predecessors.

Over a lifetime the voice of a writer, as it changes, with luck also grows more unmistakably his or her own: the changes, bearing out earlier premises and promises, come home again. That voice strengthens itself by its very accommodating of others and the other. So from the start I was after a voice that could give voice to the many people inside and out, to the drama of their collision as … to the larger music of their harmony … An ideal I have held before me is a poetry, a language, absorbed in an exploiting its own immense resources yet, at the same time, transparent to the world at large.

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Theodore Weiss is a formidable figure. For more than fifty years he has edited the Quarterly Review of Literature. His book The Breath of Clowns and Kings is probably the best study of Shakespeare's early work that we have. The Man from Porlock, a collection of essays, offers unexpected insights into such twentieth-century writers as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Yvor Winters, and Philip Larkin. The approach here is not dissimilar in some respects to that of C.S. Lewis, a comparison that Weiss might welcome. Biography, intentionality, personal recollection—all perform functions the New Critics of yesteryear would have fulfilled through verbal analysis.

Weiss's techniques succeed, however, because the prose in which they are deployed is easy and unforced. One is always conscious of a personal voice. Indeed, Weiss's criticism is so well written that it seems to spill over into his poetry. One could, in fact, say that much of his poetry is itself a kind of criticism. It is unfailingly literary, preoccupied with art and artistic effect, and powered by a highly evident interest in language. Weiss brought out his first book at an age unusually mature for a poet. Perhaps because of this, it is an especially attractive venture. It opens with "The Hook," a poem commemorating a young sculptress—"the woman who at last— / 'I do not use live models'—sculptured fish …"

There is a lyrical energy in the poem that is characteristic of Weiss's work taken as a whole. Run-on lines and composite words are typical, almost a matter of mannerisms. They testify that one of Weiss's poetic ancestors is Gerard Manley Hopkins. The use of short lines and stepped verse betoken William Carlos Williams to be another. Like this latter poet, Weiss aspires after the long poem. Also like Williams, however, Weiss has more gift for energy of phrase than for construction. The result is that the mind is often dazzled by local rhetoric while failing to grasp the larger works as entities. This is especially true of the ambitious poem Gunsight, which fills a volume of fifty-five pages. On the back cover of the volume there is an apt description of the poem within. "[Gunsight] is a narrative-dramatic psychological fantasy that records the sensations and memories of a wounded soldier as he undergoes surgery." The comment gives us a good idea of the subject matter, but it also suggests dispersion, for "narrative-dramatic psychological fantasy" seems to indicate a fairly mixed genre. At no point is a situation located with the degree of precision we find, for instance, in Robert Lowell's Life Studies or in Galway Kinnell's "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World." Rather, there is a kind of lyric haze, with detail that never quite coalesces into scene or setting: "You zigzag like a furledout, wind-flopt moth. / The breakers, toppled, hurl you onto roaring/ rocks …" Gunsight is, like its progenitor, Williams's Paterson, best read as a series of interconnected lyrics rather than as a single poem with a unifying tendency and a plot.

Weiss scores especially when his scholarship intersects with what seems to be a natural disposition toward elegy and regret. "Two for Heinrich Bleucher," from his collection of 1965, recalls a friend and colleague—"one, apart, till now squinting through the fumes…" The poem is ratified in the collection A Slow Fuse. Blücher, as the name is now spelled, is commemorated once more, along with Hannah Arendt, in possibly the most sustained verse its author has accomplished:

At once I'm in a living
room, its windows flung wide open
to the sky, as if, someone
unfolding a letter—
		pressed inside its leaves
a tiny, faded flower, mountain laurel,
what is left of one particular morning—
morning, atop this autumn afternoon,

its blazoning forth;
		gusts rousing
out of trees and braided with day's ricochet
from mountains hulked behind,
a couple dally, once more fledglings
nestled like the larks that towered round
them, rue-and-laurel-interwoven wreath …

This is a symphony of recollection and evocation. The tribute is so splendid as to compel belief in the quality of the couple thus invoked. Here the wide-ranging scholarship and empathy with the dead conjoin. The transitions have the inevitability we would expect of so practiced an editor, and the pattern of sound in the verse has a richness and variety that suggest, in no merely derivative sense, the major romantics. This volume, together with The Catch, would have been enough to set Weiss in the forefront of contemporary poets. With the oeuvre of the intervening years, including the opulent contribution of criticism, Weiss is certain, when future scholars come to review our literature, to appear a key to the age.

—Philip Hobsbaum