My life in poetry

"My Life in Poetry" by Stanton A. Coblentz is a memoir written in the mid-20th century. It traces a poet’s lifelong devotion to verse, blending personal history with reflections on craft, candid editorial skirmishes, and a firm defense of traditional poetics against fashionable formlessness. Expect vivid anecdotes of apprenticeship, newsroom verse-at-speed, hard-won publications, and the burden of a severe eye condition that paradoxically deepened his focus.

The opening of the memoir explains why the author sets the record straight about his life and his poetic principles, dismissing myths and staking a clear stand for form, clarity, and continuity with the past. He recalls a childhood inspired by his mother’s readings of Longfellow, the grief that sparked his first juvenile verses, and the solace he found in Shelley and in Bryant’s anthology. Early efforts bring laborious practice, naïve long poems, a small school prize, a bruising rejection from Leonard Bacon, a flood of editorial refusals, and a brush with a vanity publisher he wisely cannot afford. He describes the joy and trance of composition, a few early publications and misprints, a prize quatrain that opens doors to reviewing, and an invitation from a San Francisco editor. A disastrous series of eye operations leaves him permanently light-sensitive, forcing life changes but also teaching him to compose poems mentally. He widens his reading, writes a master’s thesis, denounces wrecking-ball modernisms, and studies with Bacon and Witter Bynner. Newspaper work follows—satirical animal rhymes and poems-to-order, then the threadbare Overland Monthly—before he heads to New York, where loneliness, small publications, and unhelpful introductions finally give way to a first steady reviewing assignment and a visit to Edwin Markham that promises further opportunities. (This is an automatically generated summary.)