Hayden Carruth

American poet

• Born: August 3, 1921
• Birthplace: Waterbury, Connecticut
• Died: September 29, 2008
• Place of death: Munnsville, New York

Biography

Hayden Carruth (kar-REWTH) grew up in New England, and the rural areas of northern Vermont and upstate New York have provided the settings for many of his poems. He earned a BA degree in 1943 from the University of North Carolina, spent two years in the Army Air Corps in Italy during World War II, and then earned an MA degree in 1947 from the University of Chicago. From 1949 to 1950, he was editor of Poetry magazine, and between 1950 and 1951, he was an associate editor at the University of Chicago Press. In 1953, he suffered a psychological collapse and was hospitalized at Bloomingdale asylum in White Plains, New York, where he underwent electroshock therapy—his experiences at Bloomingdale were the impetus for his powerful and disturbing poem “The Asylum,” which appeared in The Crow and the Heart, and for The Bloomingdale Papers, which were written in the early 1950s but not published until 1975. Carruth was poetry editor of Harper’s magazine from 1977 to 1983, and he became a consulting editor with The Hudson Review in 1971. His affiliations with various schools included a position as poet-in-residence at Johnson State College in Vermont, 1972–74, as adjunct professor at the University of Vermont, 1975–78, and as professor in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University, 1979–85 and 1986–91. He also taught at Bucknell University, 1985–86. He died in central New York in 2008 at the age of eighty-seven.

Carruth’s technical skill is displayed in a range of verse forms; he shows an intense concern for questions of form, and for this reason he might be grouped with such poets as Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, and the early Adrienne Rich. However, Carruth’s speakers are often rural and semiliterate, as can be seen in the lines “I mind one time down to the Grange/ Sucking up them venison meatballs/ They put on at their annual supper to raise some change,/ I seen Yewklid Morrison. . . .” Moreover, his topics range from the possibilities of spiritual transcendence, to the experience of operating a chain saw, to the Kansas City blues of Big Joe Turner. Critics have noted echoes of William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens in his lines, but Carruth has never been identified with a particular movement such as Black Mountain, Beat, or confessional.

For You and Brothers, I Loved You All are considered to be among his finest volumes, and they are typical for the tension they develop between a deep love for the natural world and other people, on one hand, and on the other an underlying existential anxiety, a painful sense of separation. Some of Carruth’s poems begin with the kind of introspective loneliness and alienation typical of much late twentieth-century American poetry, but more often that introspection is answered by an insistent interest in the world outside the self, that is, in the natural world and in other people. Brothers, I Loved You All and Asphalt Georgics also reflect Carruth’s concern over the violation of the natural world, which includes human beings, by human greed, carelessness, and callousness. Yet that sense of loss, of powerlessness, is balanced by humor—“Hey, hey, daddio,/ Them old jeans is/ Going to go!”—and a persistent delight in the people around him. The Sleeping Beauty, an ambitious long poem, is a meditation on the history and definitions of romance, the inevitable connection between knowledge and sorrow, and the possibilities of transcendence.

Carruth’s hundreds of essays and reviews appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The Saturday Review, the New York Times Book Review, Sewanee Review, The Nation, The New Republic, the Village Voice, and The Southern Review, among others. His prose is lean and direct, his tone outspoken and scholarly but simultaneously commonsensical. He wrote movingly and engagingly on poetry, on nonfiction, and on jazz and blues.

Beginning in the 1950s, Carruth received numerous awards for his work, including the University of Chicago’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, Bollingen and Guggenheim Fellowships, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize, the Governor’s Medal from the state of Vermont, the National Book Critics Circle Award (for Collected Shorter Poems), and both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991–1995. Carruth was the kind of writer who seems to be admired and read most often by other writers (especially other poets), and he was known for his generosity to younger poets. Carruth put together a substantial body of work in both prose and poetry that forms an important contribution to mid-and late twentieth century American letters.

Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems (2006) would be the final collection Carruth published in his lifetime. Four years after his death, in 2012, Last Poems was published. This volume collects all of the unpublished poems that Carruth had written in the last years of his life as well as the last poem from twenty-six of his previous works and eulogistic essays from several high-profile poets.

Author Works

Poetry:

The Crow and the Heart, 1959

Journey to a Known Place, 1961

The Norfolk Poems, 1962

Nothing for Tigers, 1965

For You, 1970

The Clay Hill Anthology, 1970

From Snow and Rock, from Chaos, 1973

Dark World, 1974

The Bloomingdale Papers, 1975

Brothers, I Loved You All, 1978

The Sleeping Beauty, 1982, revised 1990

If You Call This Cry a Song, 1983

Asphalt Georgics, 1985

The Oldest Killed Lake in North America, 1985

The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, 1985

Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands, 1989

Collected Shorter Poems, 1946–1991, 1992

Collected Longer Poems, 1993

Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991–1995, 1996

A Summer with Tu Fu: A Sequence of Poems, 1996

Doctor Jazz, 2001

Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems, 2006 (Sam Hamill, editor)

Last Poems, 2012

Long Fiction:

Appendix A, 1963

Nonfiction:

Working Papers: Selected Essays and Reviews, 1982

Effluences from the Sacred Caves: More Selected Essays and Reviews, 1983

Sitting In: Selected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Related Topics, 1986

Suicides and Jazzers, 1992

Selected Essays and Reviews, 1996

Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays, 1998

Beside the Shadblow Tree: A Memoir of James Laughlin, 1999

Letters to Jane, 2004

Edited Texts:

The Bird-Poem Book, 1970

The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, 1970

Bibliography

Booth, Philip. “On Brothers, I Loved You All.” American Poetry Review 8 (May/June, 1979): 13–16. Fellow poet Booth praises Carruth’s immediacy and vitality, the “tensile strength” of his use of abstractions, and his willingness to risk direct statement. Not compelled by the Frostian poems in Brothers, I Loved You All, Booth is cogently appreciative of the rest of the book.

Feder, Lillian. “Poetry from the Asylum: Hayden Carruth’s The Bloomingdale Papers.” Literature and Medicine 4 (1985): 112–127. Feder gives a brief account of the writing and publication history of The Bloomingdale Papers and a rather stiff but useful analysis of its depiction of the poet’s struggle to remake his self. She also notes connections with later works, including Brothers, I Loved You All and The Sleeping Beauty, and calls particular attention to the ongoing search for self-realization through love.

Flint, R. W. “The Odyssey of Hayden Carruth.” Parnassus 11, no. 1 (1983): 17-32. Flint praises The Sleeping Beauty as one of the most important poems of the 1980s. He commends Carruth’s tough-minded sanity, comparing The Sleeping Beauty to Robert Lowell’s long poems and John Berryman’s The Dream Songs (1969), he finds that Carruth’s poem has a much better plot, if less mere excitement. Flint also briefly discusses Working Papers.

Howard, Richard. “To a Known Place.” Poetry 107 (1966): 253–258. Howard surveys Carruth’s poetry through Nothing for Tigers, finding in the early books debts to Wallace Stevens, John Crowe Ransom, W. B. Yeats, and Allen Tate, but celebrating and briefly analyzing the psychological and visionary impulses of Journey to a Known Place and Nothing for Tigers.

Miller, Matthew. “A Love Supreme: Jazz and the Poetry of Hayden Carruth.”Midwest Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1998): 294–339. Discusses the influence of jazz on Carruth’s poetry, particularly the poet’s use of jazz-inspired “improvization.”

Robbins, Anthony. “Hayden Carruth: An Interview.” The American Poetry Review 22, no. 5 (September/October, 1993): 47–49. Robbins gives a brief biography of Carruth and summarizes an interview covering many subjects including Marxist ideology, E. L. Doctorow’s influence on The Sleeping Beauty, and the development of poetic philosophy.

Solotaroff, Ted. "One of Us: The Poetry of Hayden Carruth." American Poetry Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2010, pp. 31–33. Provides a summary of Carruth's life and work as well as a discussion of major themes in his poetry.

Weiss, David, ed. In the Act: Essays on the Poetry of Hayden Carruth. Seneca Review 20 (1990). This special issue of Seneca Review features twelve essays on Carruth’s work by Wendell Berry, David Rivard, Maxine Kumin, Sam Hamill, David Budbill, and others; an interview with Carruth; and new poems. The essays range from personal reminiscences to formal literary criticism, and they discuss Carruth’s work from his earliest poems to Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands. An extensive and valuable resource.