Elliott Coleman's
27 Night Sonnets
by Gardner McFall

Elliott Coleman (1908-1980) was a poet, scholar, and translator who founded the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 1946 and directed the program until his retirement twenty-nine years later. He was modest and extremely refined, not the sort to play the "fame game," as noted in a 1975 Baltimore Sun article. He shunned poetic camps and, as a teacher welcomed all predispositions in his classroom. In 1974, when I was fortunate enough to attend one of his seminars in the last year he directed them, there were New York School, projectionist, concrete, surrealist, and formalist poets in his workshop, each of whom he encouraged and, when warranted, praised.

Coleman's first two volumes, The Poems of Elliott Coleman (Dutton, 1936) and An American in Augustland (University of North Carolina Press, 1940), received unfavorable reviews, which may have led to his failure to secure either a wide readership or a place in the canon. The year of his first book was the year Robert Frost published his sixth, A Further Range, with such now well-known, often-anthologized poems as "Provide Provide," "Design," and "Two Tramps in Mud Time." Frost, Williams, Stevens, Eliot, and Moore dominated the American poetic landscape, which allowed little room or welcome for a poet whose early work, despite its promise, struck critics as overly "poeticized" (New York Times, May 3, 1936). To his credit, however, Coleman never ceased writing, publishing, or growing as a poet; he produced more than a dozen collections in his lifetime.

Coleman's work evolved substantially from the strict, sometimes stilted poems of his first book to the associative, free-verse splendor of "Mockingbirds at Fort McHenry" (1963): "the objects memorized for beauty / have kept one from the truth / and there is not time / break it up·" (One Hundred Poems) Much of this sixty-seven-verse sequence first appeared in Poetry. It signaled an artistic breakthrough for him, occasioned by his reading of Lawrence Kubie's Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process (Noonday Press, 1961) and became a cult poem for the poetry students in the Seminars in 1974.

The poems I return to with the most admiration and pleasure are Coleman's sonnets. He published nearly a hundred (though he probably wrote many more) and collected those he valued, along with other work, in One Hundred Poems (Tinker Press, 1972). One of these (number 3 in his sequence "Oedipus Sonnets") is included in the recently published Penguin Book of the Sonnet, edited by Phillis Levin. My favorite of his collections is a little New Directions book entitled 27 Night Sonnets (1949); it reflects a time (and publisher) that recognized not only the work of an unfashionable poet of merit, but the art of book production as well.

Measuring three by four inches, with a mustard cover, sturdily sewn, it's the perfect quality and size to slip inside your pocket for spontaneous reading in a free moment. New Directions printed five hundred copies, one of which is held in the New York Public Library's Collection of Rare Books and Manuscripts. It contains six sequences: "Christmas Sonnets," "June Sonnets," "Sonnets Motionless in a Moment of Vision," "Mexican Sonnets," "Baltimore Sonnets," and "Sonnets of Flesh and Blood." They reveal Coleman's ongoing preoccupation with his relation to Christian belief (he was an ordained Episcopal priest who turned away from the church), the reality of loss and death, the combustibility and disappointment of love, and the sensuality of the world. Doubtless, the sonnet form appealed to him because its structure permitted the entertainment and containment of strong, often opposite emotions. It suited the courtly formality of his temperament.

The poems in 27 Night Sonnets are distinct and realized, reflecting Coleman's ability to manage the line with a language of his own; these are sonnets of delicate feeling, thought, and personal struggle. In sonnet 2 of the "Christmas Sonnets," he begins: "The trouble with me is I've stayed Christian. God, / what do I dial for information, please?" And in number 6, he continues:

For staying Christian does the whole   world in and turns us inside out and fouls up time: but where the breaking atoms shift, spin and explode, the contour is sublime In constancy, in polar reverence: the thing is joy: remembered in a face, eyes closed, lips half asleep to sense: we shall be calling each other the human   race And there we'll have to stick, torn-sick   and proud, murderers desperate for love and doom, raging against the texture of the shroud: for men a burial sheet, for gods a womb. O smile to the morning: goodness, grace,   how free. How fair the circumstances begin to be.

Truthfully, in 1974, I wasn't familiar with Elliott Coleman's work other than the small-press books then in circulation, Tangerine Birds (Harbor House, 1973), In The Canyon (Bay Press, 1974), and of course the poem "Mockingbirds at Fort McHenry." I was too callow to pay close attention to One Hundred Poems. I just knew Coleman was a beneficent teacher, whose credo might have been, like the physician's, primum non nocere. Now I also see that as a practicing poet, translator of Pierre Emmanuel and Georges Poulet, editor of Poems of Byron, Keats and Shelley, and admired scholar of Proust (Wallace Fowlie called his Golden Angel: Papers on Proust (1954) "subtly and delicately conceived"), he was a substantial figure. He was a poet's poet, whom Eliot, Frost, cummings, Karl Shapiro, Ammons, and Jacobsen, among others, counted as a peer and friend. He was one of the most prolific, accomplished sonnet writers of his century.




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