Thomas McGrath

American poet

• Born: November 20, 1916
• Birthplace: Near Sheldon, North Dakota
• Died: September 19, 1990
• Place of death: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Biography

Thomas McGrath reached the pinnacle of his career only a few years before he died, after having been chosen to give the keynote address in 1987 at the Associated Writing Programs Convention in Chicago. Such honors were unknown to McGrath until late in his life, in spite of his having written poetry since the 1930’s. McGrath never really received the accolades that were due him on the basis of the extended poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend, an influential multivolume work. It was a young editor at Chicago’s Swallow Press named Michael Anania who insisted that the press issue the beginning of McGrath’s epic.

McGrath lived through the Depression and worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency. At one point he was able to work as an essayist, journalist, and screenwriter. Then the communist witch-hunt era of the 1950’s hit, and McGrath was called to speak before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). He refused to speak and was censured by the HUAC. He was then blacklisted by the film industry and ultimately by all publishers. The suspicion that he was a communist was leaked out of Washington, effectively ending his career as a writer for decades. Twenty years of his writing life was in effect excised, and McGrath went on to hold a number of jobs, none with any meaning for him. Though McGrath shows strong socialist leanings in his writing, it is doubtful that he was ever a communist.

McGrath started work on Letter to an Imaginary Friend a number of years after the HUAC incident. Not only could he find no publisher for it, but also he could not find magazine editors willing to publish it in sections. The censorship was complete until Swallow Press, realizing that the mood in the country had changed, decided to take a chance on the first part of his book. Meanwhile, at the very end of the 1960’s, the restrictions that had followed McGrath most of his adult life began to lift. Poetry magazine awarded him its Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship; McGrath also received a Guggenheim Fellowship at this time. George Hitchcock’s small magazine Kayak began to publish large chunks of Letter to an Imaginary Friend irregularly, and McGrath published several small books abroad, all of which almost immediately went out of print.

Letter to an Imaginary Friend is an ambitious work. It contains parts of American history from the colonial period as well as more contemporary views of the West. Written in a largely colloquial style that is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1963), the poem has several narrative threads that continue throughout. The HUAC hearings and their aftermath are examined, and McGrath includes a lyrical winter scene that might be compared to his life after HUAC. Included are views of myth and the creation of new myth.

McGrath also experimented with different forms, as in his Letters to Tomasito, his son. The poems in Letters to Tomasito are spare and lyrical, not narrative at all. Many of the poems in Death Song (McGrath knew he was seriously ill at least three years before he died) resemble the poems to his son. McGrath knew he was writing his last work, and many of the poems consist of single quatrains. These poems are lyrical, but they also take on a narrative push, as if McGrath had some final things he needed to say to those he knew.

Bibliography

Cohen, Marty. “The Imaginary Friendships of Thomas McGrath.” Parnassus 21, nos. 1/2 (1996): 193-212. An extensive review of books by and on McGrath.

Di Piero, W. S. “Politics in Poetry: The Case of Thomas McGrath.” New England Review 17, no. 4 (Fall, 1995): 41. An analysis of the political aspects of McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend.

Gibbons, Reginald, and Terrence Des Pres, eds. Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Originally published as a special issue of TriQuarterly in 1987, contains some valuable biographical information on McGrath, including a firsthand account of his waterfront years as a labor organizer and agitator. It includes the reminiscences of former students as well.

McGrath, Thomas. “Surviving as a Writer: The Politics of Poetry/The Poetry of Politics.” Interview by Jim Dochniak. Sez: A Multi-Racial Journal of Poetry and People’s Culture 2/3 (1981): A-L, special section. A twelve-page transcript of an informal interview at the University of Minnesota. McGrath here touches on the childhood sources of his writing, his socialist politics, and his international travels. He distinguishes between tactical and strategic poetry and discusses his struggle to survive financially.

McKenzie, James. “Conversations with Thomas McGrath.” North Dakota Quarterly 56 (Fall, 1988): 135-150. Compiled here are anecdotes and excerpts from McGrath discussions, interviews, and panel events at the University of North Dakota throughout the years. Topics include McGrath’s association with the Beat poets and the autobiographical background to Letter to an Imaginary Friend. His former wife Alice McGrath joins in.

North Dakota Quarterly 50 (Fall, 1982). In this special issue, an assortment of writers, students, and friends reflect, sometimes whimsically, on McGrath and his work. Edited by Robert W. Lewis, it includes poems written in honor of McGrath and important essays on his career and his politics, as well as McGrath’s “Statement to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.”

Stern, Frederick, ed. The Revolutionary Poet in the United States. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. A two-hundred-page collection of critical essays, retrospectives, and scholarship on McGrath. This book includes work by Diane Wakoski, Hayden Carruth, Studs Terkel, and E. P. Thompson. The volume is a good collection of supplementary material as well, including a chronology of works, biographical sketch, and complete bibliography.