The Tradition

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 1986 & 2014 – Present

from the publisher

“I wanted to write a book about my childhood home, Niles, Ohio,” the author of these poems tells us. “In going back there and trying to do so, I found it necessary first to write another book, about my growing up, in order to weigh my perceptions of the place. I didn’t find there only the citizens of Niles, their lives, their works and the landscape, but also most of the ideas, stories and figures that people my thought and that were trasmitted to me through that place from other places and times.”

These places and times are as diverse as the Homeric Mediterranean, Malory’s England, Cretaceous North America, and the Polynesia and Africa and Arctic of the nineteenth-centrury explorers. The most presing thing about the place of origin becomes the interpenetration there of natural, autobiographical and cultural elements. There is no passionate personal experience without culture, the poet claims, and vice versa. The book has much of the modern sense of the individual being at a loss, but a partial answer comes from the inexhaustible freshness and splendor of the environment, “a possession that can come back to us equally from some idea of Petra or Nineveh or from a roadside ditch by a mill.”

The Tradition has been chosen one of the first group of books to be offered in a print-on-demand edition in Princeton University Press’s new Princeton Legacy Series, a group of titles republished as print-on-demand from the press’s history back to 1906. Order this title as a print on demand book from Princeton University Press