I had just graduated from college, with a broken heart. That old story. Percy Shelley’s words were ringing in my mind: “Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud, / I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed.” I needed something to read that was long and wordy and melancholic, that I could lose myself in and maybe find myself.

I was slated to enter graduate school at the University of North Carolina in September. I knew that the Carolina Players were scheduled to do the play Look Homeward, Angel that fall—the premiere performance off Broadway, as I remember. Maybe I should read Thomas Wolfe, I told myself. The practical side of me said that it would get me in the mood for Carolina and fill in a major gap in my reading—modern American fiction. So I set up a summer reading plan: Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Faulkner’s Sound and Fury, and Thomas Wolfe. The sentimental, self-centered side of me gave precedence to Wolfe. I checked out a whole shelf full of his weighty tomes: Look Homeward, Angel (of course), Of Time and the River, The Web and the Rock, maybe You Can’t Go Home Again.

Now I must admit that I cannot remember whether I read them all, and I don’t remember much about the story of any of them. I do remember well identifying with Eugene Gant, and also seeing myself—sentimentalizing myself—in his fated brother Ben. But what I really remember is losing myself in Wolfe’s language: those long, ponderous, convoluted, many-layered sentences, those weighty and sonorous words, the dreamy self consciousness, the impressionistic imagery and details, the dark allusions and deliberate repetitions. It was what I needed in that long, languorous summer of despondency and self-pity.

I never read a Thomas Wolfe novel again. Been there, done that. But years later I found some of those sentences recast in lines, as free verse. Living a rich, full life—quite unlike that of Eugene Gant, or of Thomas Wolfe—I got a glimpse of the maudlin young man I had been in that last summer of my youth.

. . . A stone, a leaf, an unfound door;
Of a stone, a leaf, a door,
And of all the forgottn faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile.
In her dark womb
We did not know our mother’s face;
From the prison of her flesh have we come
Into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison
Of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother?
Which of s has looked into his father’s heart?
Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

Ah, yes! A stranger forever. Alone. Then there was this photo of my namesake, Ben.

We can believe in the nothingness of life,
We can believe in the nothingness of death
And of life after death—
But who can believe in the nothingness of Ben?

Like Apollo,
Who did his penance to the high god
In the sad house of King Admetus,
He came,
A god with broken feet,
Into the gray hovel of this world.

He lived here a stranger,
Trying to recapture the music
Of the lost world,
Trying to recall
The great forgotten language,
The lost faces,
The stone, the leaf, the door.

O Artemidorus, farewell!

But it was Eugene who spoke for me, Eugene with whom I identified in “the gray hovel of his world.”

He understood
That men were forever strangers
To one another,
That no one ever comes really
To know another,
That, imprisoned in the dark womb
Of our mother,
We come to life
Without having seen her face,
That we are given to her arms
A stranger,
And that, caught
In that insoluble prison of being,
We escape it never,
No matter what arms may clasp us,
What mouth may kiss us,
What heart may warm us.
Never, never, never, never, never.

Indeed, that was the summer of my discontent. I think I formulated some vague notion of writing out of my own depths, as Wolfe had done, but a year or so later I enrolled in a fiction writing class at Vanderbilt University and learned within the first week or two that, though I had a way with words, my story was simply a story. It had no depth of meaningfulness. So much for that daydream. I dropped the course and never attempted fiction again. Eventually I took to writing long lines of free verse and haikuesque images of immediate experience. Only for myself. I dared not call it “poetry.” It wasn’t worthy of being called by the same term one applied to the works of Keats or Coleridge, Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Sketches, I called them, or vignettes. I still belonged to the language community of Thomas Wolfe, without his “meaningful” stories.

Then, all those years later, I found in Thomas Wolfe’s language one of the finest collections of poetry written in 20th century America: A Stone, A Leaf, A Door: Poems by Thomas Wolfe (Scribner’s, 1945) selected and arranged in verse by John S. Barnes. How I wish I had discovered Wolfe in this format in that long, long-ago summer.

The best review of the book that I have seen, or can imagine, is in Louis Untermeyer’s foreword:

“It has often been suggested that Thomas Wolfe was a poet who elected to write in prose. This volume proves the suggestion to be a fact. More than anything else, Wolfe wanted to be a poet. But, as John Hall Wheelock discloses in his Introduction to The Face of a Nation, Wolfe placed so much emphasis on conventional form [Keats and Coleridge, Dickinson and Hopkins] that he confused the shape with the spirit of his hugely sprawling lines and cast himself out of the company of poets.

“Now Sergeant J. S. Barnes has gone over everything Wolfe ever wrote, and he has discovered that most of the writing is not only rhapsodic—a discovery likely to be made by the casual reader—but that much of it falls into deeply rhythmical, strongly cadenced verse. Rearranging, or, rather, re-spacing the long plunging passages, he has broken down the line between prose and verse. Revealing the pure poetic impetus which propels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, and is even more compelling in the later work, this selection restores Wolfe to the company from which he fearfully excluded himself and to which he rightfully belongs.” (p. v)

But I realize that in the poems I have quoted thus far in this review, I have emphasized the torpor of my dispirited summer. You have to look beyond Eugene Gant to find the crisp imagery and heart-felt insights of Thomas Wolfe, an extraordinary American poet:

October is the richest of the seasons:
The fields are cut,
The granaries are full,
The bins are loaded to the brim with fatness,
And from the cider-press the rich brown oozings
Of the York Imperials run.

The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape,
The fly gets old and fat and blue,
He buzzes loud, crawls slow,
Creeps heaving to death
On sill and ceiling,
The sun goes down in blood and pollen
Across the bronzed and mown fields
Of old October.

The corn is shocked:
It sticks out in yellow rows
Upon dried ears,
Fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania,
And the big stained teeth of crunching horses.
The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards,
The barn is sweet with hay and leather,
Wood and apples—
This, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth
Are all:
The sweat, the labor, and the plow
Are over.
The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf;
Smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters;
The pantry shelves are loaded
With 300 jars of fruit.

. . . . .

But summer is dead and gone,
The earth is waiting,
Suspense and ecstasy
Are gnawing at the hearts of men,
The brooding prescience of frost is there.

These are two excerpts from the longer “poem” on the “American earth in old October,” what Wolfe calls a mighty landscape “That can never be remembered, / That can never be forgotten, / That has never been described”—”A cry, a space, an ecstasy!”

And then there is Wolfe’s valedictory—whether intentional or not—with which Barnes closes this collection, a poem to which he gives the title “Toward Which”:

Something has spoken to me in the night,
Burning the tapers of the waning year;
Something has spoken in the night,
And told me I shall die, I know not where.

Saying:
“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing;
To lose the life you have, for greater life;
To leave the friends you loved, for greater loving;
To find a land more kind than home, more large than earth—

“—Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded,
Toward which the conscience of the world is tending—
A wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”

Thomas Wolfe was one of my favorite writers in high school. I read "Look Homeward Angel", "You Can't Go Home Again", and "The Web and the Rock", and was overwhelmed by his power to the point of overlooking how overwritten he was. His editor had the interesting idea, after Wolfe's death, of selecting his prose from some of his books and setting them in poetic form. It works, sort of. The poems are lyrical and with a definite rhythym. But with a couple of exceptions, removing them from their larger context cost too much in meaning. That being said, "Eugene" (pg 13) is a moving testament to the pain of man's eternal loneliness, and "This is Man" (pg 47) powerfully traces the best and worst of the human condition, and finds it roughly a draw. There are a couple of others I liked; otherwise they are good poems that become repetitive throughout the book, and largely forgettable. ( )