Reviews

Foounded in 1919 as a way to exhibit the poetic precocity of Yale students, the Yale Younger Poets series has evolved over 78 years into a flagship imprimatur for a poet's first book. As this volume demonstrates, the series remained a venue for late-19th-century neo-classicism until 1933, when the able Stephen Vincent Benét took the helm as judge. James Agee, Muriel Rukeyser and Margaret Walker were all published during his tenure. As Bradley (a winner himself in 1986) describes in his informative introduction, each of the judges carried out their duties with their own styles, from the distant and difficult Archibald MacLeish and the eccentric classicist Dudley Fitts (who selected James Tate and George Starbuck), to the series' most famous and successful arbiter, W.H. Auden. The work Auden chose (no less idiosyncratically than the others) is some of the best here: John Ashbery's Some Trees, early formal work by Adrienne Rich, the debuts of W.S. Merwin, John Hollander and James Wright. Stanley Kunitz, Richard Hugo and James Merrill were among Auden's successors, and their picks included Alan Dugan, Jean Valentine, Carolyn Forche, former laureate Robert Hass, and Cathy Song. There is some surprisingly good work from two little-known poets whose single volumes were from the series, Joan Murray (who died at 25) and Robert Horan, as well as by Rosalie Moore‘all chosen by Auden; there is also some embarrassing work that, ironically, is mostly taken from volumes that were among the series' bestsellers. Part of the fun of this skewed, sometimes claustrophobic history of 20th-century American poetry is to try to determine who will "make it" from the contest's last judge, the late James Dickey, or to find an underdog to champion from among the lesser-knowns. (Apr.)