GHISELIN, Brewster

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Nationality: American. Born: Webster Groves, Missouri, 13 June 1903. Education: University of California, Los Angeles, A.B. 1927, and Berkeley, M.A. 1928, 1931–33; Oxford University, 1928–29. Family: Married Olive F. Franks in 1929; two sons. Career: Instructor in English, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1929–31; assistant in English, University of California, Berkeley, 1931–33. Instructor, 1934–38, lecturer, 1938–39, assistant professor, 1939–46, associate professor, 1946–50, director of the Writers' Conference, 1947–66, professor of English, 1950–71, Distinguished Research Professor, 1967–68, and since 1971 professor emeritus, University of Utah. Poetry editor, 1937–46, and associate editor, 1946–49, Rocky Mountain Review, later Western Review, Salt Lake City, and Lawrence, Kansas. Member of the editorial advisory board, Concerning Poetry, from 1968. Awards: Ford fellowship, 1952; Ben and Abby Grey Foundation award, 1965; American Academy award, 1970; Oscar Blumenthal prize, 1973, and Levinson prize, 1978 (Poetry, Chicago); William Carlos Williams award, 1981; Utah Arts Council Governor's award, 1982; D.H.L.: University of Utah, 1994. Address: 1747 Princeton Avenue, Salt Lake City, Utah 84108, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Against the Circle. New York, Dutton, 1946.

The Nets. New York, Dutton, 1955.

Images and Impressions, with Edward Lueders and Clarice Short. Salt Lake City, University of Utah Printmaking Department, 1969.

Country of the Minotaur. Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1970.

Light. Omaha, Abattoir, 1978.

Windrose: Poems 1929–1979. Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1980.

The Dreamers. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Palaemon Press, 1981.

Flame. Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1991.

Other

Writing. Washington, D.C., American Association of University Women, 1959.

Editor, The Creative Process: A Symposium. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1952; revised edition, New York, Penguin, 1985.

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Manuscript Collection: Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York, Buffalo; Princeton University Libraries, Princeton, New Jersey.

Critical Studies: Spinning the Crystal Ball by James Dickey, Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, 1967; "An Earthen Vessel" by William Ralston, in Sewanee Review (Tennessee), summer 1969; by Radcliffe Squires, in Concerning Poetry (Bellingham, Washington), fall 1970; by Kathleen Raine, in Sewanee Review (Tennessee), spring 1971; by Samuel French Morse, in Michigan Quarterly Review (Ann Arbor), fall 1971; by Henry Taylor, in Masterplots: 1971 Annual and Magill's Literary Annual 1981, New York, Salem Press, 1971, 1981; "The Long and Short of It" by Robert B. Shaw, in Poetry (Chicago), March 1972; "The Needle and the Garment" by X.J. Kennedy, in Counter/Measures 3 (Bedford, Massachusetts), 1974; The Water of Light: A Miscellany in Honor of Brewster Ghiselin, edited by Henry Taylor, Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1976; "Brewster Ghiselin Issue" of The Blue Hotel I (Lincoln, Nebraska), 1980; "The Poetry of Brewster Ghiselin" by Dave Smith, in Western Humanities Review (Salt Lake City), summer 1981; "Brewster Ghiselin: The Gift of the Waters," by Henry Taylor, in Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets, Baton Rouge and London, Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Brewster Ghiselin comments:

Like almost every poet, I feel that my poetry can live only in being heard, that it must be given the body of life as sensation of sound and of vibration and movement of the articulating voice. Though I have used a great variety of forms and measures, I have never written free verse. The measure I have most often found right is accentual, a strongly stressed and syllabically various flow that I first heard clearly when I read Beowulf in Old English and turned to my own freer use long before I read any of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In my writing of poetry all considerations of verse form arise from the fact that the shaping of verse is the shaping of breath, the breath of life in every sense. If a poet says, "The poetry does not matter," as T.S. Eliot did in one context, meaning I suppose that nothing matters except what has been called "the ground of being," he simply reminds me of the vast importance of poetry, which only through accord with that inexhaustible attains whatever life it has. In the degree that poetry is realization and communion, it is false to say that it does not matter. The poetry matters. Whom the wind scatters Breath makes one again.

My central subject is men's struggle for breath, for being and light. Under the universal necessity of change, which sweeps away all form, man can have integrity and wholeness only through ceaseless shaping and reshaping of himself and his course and of those perspectives of vision that direct it. What draws my interest most and gives me matter and theme is the passion of living creatures to transcend the limits that choke them and to find and enjoy the limits that, each in changing succession, are the freeing form of a moment of breath.

(1995) A poem can be like a font. (Anglo Saxon-Old English: font, fant, from Latin fons, fontis, spring, fountain.) Cf. Heracleitus: "Other and other the waters flow."

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Brewster Ghiselin's two early collections offered many poems whose parts were so polished that it was difficult to grasp the whole. The effect was that of Byzantine mosaics seen close, an effect of brilliant yet disparate atomies rather than of anatomy. Yet in a later collection, Country of the Minotaur, the opposite is true. The parts are still burnished, but the confluence of a tidal rhythm, an audacious language, and important themes distances the poems so that one sees their integrity and strength, as Yeats saw the integrity and strength of the lofty mosaics at Ravenna. This virtuous distance has come because Ghiselin has developed into one of the few contemporary poets whose faith rests in universals. Because his quandaries are eternal, they remain pure as they remain unresolved. Because his passions are conceived as parallels of the passions of vast energies, like sea and land, they remain at peace, most at peace when most violent.

Passion and peace define the boundaries of his poems, and the field within the boundaries is the nature that modern science has made both more heartless and more mysteriously beautiful than the nature Wordsworth knew. It is a nature that can be understood only as a broad order that barely superintends random movement or fluctuation. Except for Saint-John Perse, I can think of no one who is so majestically at home in this nomadic driftland. In some ways Ghiselin is the better poet, for he varies his focus while Saint-John Perse does not.

—Radcliffe Squires