The Flowering Stone
by George Dillon
Summary
The Flowering Stone gathers George Dillon's reflective love lyrics and shorter meditations on time, beauty and loss into a collection built almost entirely around closed, traditionally measured forms, sonnets and other tightly rhymed structures rather than the free verse experiments many of Dillon's contemporaries were pursuing. Dillon favors a careful, polished, faintly elegiac tone that keeps his poems from tipping into open sentiment even when their subjects, a fading love, the passage of time, the erosion of beauty, invite it, and that restraint gives the collection a controlled, songlike clarity rather than the more expansive or argumentative mode other poets of the period were adopting.
Dillon's own literary friendship with Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom he met in 1928 when she gave a reading at the University of Chicago, shaped this book directly; the two moved in the same lyric tradition, and the collection's polished formalism and elegiac tone show a poet working in close sympathy with Millay's own sonnet writing, a resemblance contemporaries noticed at the time. Dillon was still in his mid twenties when the poems in the book were written, and the collection carries a young poet's confidence in an inherited tradition rather than any anxiety about working against it, treating traditional form as a live resource rather than something to overturn.
Reading The Flowering Stone means moving through short, formally disciplined poems that trade the ambition of scale for precision of feeling, each one aiming to say a single thing about love, beauty or loss as exactly and economically as the form allows. It suits a reader drawn to compact, classically shaped lyric poetry in the tradition Millay had already made popular, written by a poet working confidently inside that tradition rather than reacting against it.
Historical Context & Significance
George Dillon won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Flowering Stone at twenty five, making him one of the youngest winners in the prize's history to that point. His close relationship with Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom he had met in 1928, deepened after the prize; he inspired her fifty two sonnet sequence Fatal Interview, and the two later collaborated on a 1936 English translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, published as Flowers of Evil.
Dillon went on to serve as editor of Poetry magazine from 1937 to 1949, shaping the journal through more than a decade spanning the Second World War, during which he served in the Army Signal Corps and was present at the liberation of Paris. Most of his own poetry, including The Flowering Stone, is now out of print, and he is remembered today largely through his connection to Millay.