Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,756

This is the grave of Allen Grossman.

Born in 1932 in Minneapolis, Grossman grew up in a Jewish family in that city. His father ran a Chevy dealership. He started writing as a kid and was good at it. He went to Harvard on and off, but he not only graduated, but got an MA in 1956. He then went on to Brandeis for his PhD, which he received in 1960. Brandeis then hired him as an English professor, where he remained for the next 31 years. He then took a job at Johns Hopkins and stayed there until he retired in 2005.

So what, you are saying? Well, Grossman became a pretty major American poet. I don’t know his work, not at all. But I can cite the discussion of Grossman at the Poetry Foundation:

Poet and critic Allen R. Grossman occupies a unique position in contemporary American letters: though influenced by the modernism and postmodernism that shaped so many poets of his generation, Grossman did not align himself with any one poetic community. Instead, his poetry is often described as coming out of the modern Romantic tradition of lyric poetry, and he writes in a high style, reflecting the influence of William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane. According to the late poet and critic Reginald Shepherd, “Grossman shares the Romantic and High Modernist exalted idea of the poet’s vocation and of the power of poetry to engage and encompass the world on equal terms … Though his poetry is not devoid of irony or even humor, Grossman is never embarrassed or ironic about the greatness he believes poetry to be capable of making apparent, nor about his own ambitions to approach such greatness, although in his view its attainment is impossible: to write the perfect poem would be to reach the end of poetry.” A noted scholar, Grossman’s book The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Writers and Readers (1992), which he wrote with Mark Halliday, remains a kind of cult classic of poetics. The work addresses the philosophical implications of lyric poetry and lays out Grossman’s own understanding of the nature of poetic address.

Grossman became what some called “a poet’s poet.” His work was considered redolent of past elite poets such as Wallace Stevens, Coleridge, Byron, and others. To quote the New York Times obituary of him, his poem “Shipfitters”

suggests the wondrous variety of human life and extols the virtue of knowing how to make things well, ends with the narrator envisioning his “death-ship” carrying him gloriously into the busy harbor of eternity. But it begins with a curious juxtaposition of reflections on Leonardo da Vinci and Midge Berger, his mother’s best friend:

It’s a matter of concern to me that Leonardo’s

Angels — who are so beautiful — are inadequately

provided with wings by the curious master.

Surely Leonardo knew they couldn’t arrive here

to pray, or point, or weep, or at the end

save themselves from fire, by the means depicted.

It’s also a matter of concern to me that Midge Berger,

wife of Ben Berger who owned the Mpls. Lakers,

played a good game of golf despite a tic

over her left eye (which raised her handicap)

and that Ben, a short man, liked to be photographed

next to George Mikan (7’2”), whom he hired for the purpose.

Grossman was widely lauded in his lifetime, including with a MacArthur Felllowship, the so-called “genius grant.” He also won the Bollingen Prize, considered the top prize for American poets, in 2009. He also published widely on writers from Wordsworth to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He was considered a top rate scholar as well as poet.

Grossman died in 2014, at the age of 82.

Allen Grossman is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other twentieth century poets, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Robert Hayden is in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Charles Henri Ford is in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.