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Though his earliest poems were published more than sixty years ago, Ben Belitt’s works in sum are likely to strike readers today with the force of unprecedented encounter. A poet of abundance and sometimes carnivalesque riotousness, Belitt also calls to mind the intensity and eruptiveness of Hopkins, the double passion for the infinite and the empirical exemplified by Neruda, and the lustrous word painting associated with Keatsian Romanticism. But as these diverse predecessors suggest, Belitt is altogether an original, whose derivation is as multiple as his figuration. His concerns range from the appalled enthrallment with violence and disorder to the rage to learn how one can live in chance and confront the mandates of mortality. Scrupulously attentive to place, Belitt is also haunted by a sense of fated displacements and havoc. Many of his best poems are elegiac, and his autobiographical works possess a posthumous air. In “This Scribe, My Hand,” perhaps his greatest poem in this genre, Belitt offers a powerful tribute to Keats while concurrently meditating upon his own forfeits and failures. The startling prose poem “School of the Soldier,” previously unpublished in book form, is also included. At once poignant in their registration of loss and defiant in their insistence upon connection, meaning, and wholeness, Belitt’s poems offer readers a fresh opportunity to discover “the fascination of what is difficult” and distinctive, marvelously rich and achingly human.
Ben Belitt (1911–2003) produced eight volumes of verse and translated and edited the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcìa Lorca, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. he received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; NEA, Rockefeller and American Academy of Arts and Letters awards; and the Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry from the Poetry Society of America. He lived in Bennington, Vermont, where he taught comparative literature at Bennington College for a half century.
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