Selected Poems
by Richard Eberhart
Summary
Selected Poems 1930 to 1965 draws together thirty five years of Richard Eberhart's work, from poems written not long after his mother's death from cancer first turned him toward writing, through his service in the Naval Reserve during the Second World War, up to the mid 1960s, decades during which he was also a private tutor, a ship's hand, and eventually a lieutenant commander, tracking a poet who kept circling the same handful of subjects across all of it: death, war, the weather, and moments when ordinary perception suddenly opens onto something larger.
The volume includes "The Groundhog," Eberhart's best known poem, built around the speaker's encounter with a dead animal and using that encounter to think through mortality directly, one of the clearest instances of the visionary surges his own discursive style makes room for. It also includes "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment," written out of his wartime naval service, which opens by questioning whether a caring God can be reconciled with this era's violence from the air. Eberhart writes in a discursive, sometimes oracular voice, willing to let a poem run uneven or excessive if that is what following a genuine visionary surge requires, a deliberate contrast to the tighter, more ironic control that many of his New Critical contemporaries prized.
Reading the book means following a poet more interested in the shock of an idea catching fire than in polish for its own sake, moving between plain rural observation and sudden metaphysical lift. It suits a reader drawn to spontaneity over restraint, someone who wants to watch a mind change in real time rather than arrive at a poem already fully resolved.
Historical Context & Significance
Selected Poems 1930 to 1965 won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, honoring a body of work built over three and a half decades rather than a single new book.
Eberhart taught for thirty years at Dartmouth College, his alma mater, as professor and poet in residence, after earlier posts at Brown, Princeton, and Columbia and years spent working for his wife's family's floor wax company while he kept writing. He served as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve during the Second World War, an experience that fed directly into "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment," and he lived until 2005, one of the longest lived of any Pulitzer poetry winner, remaining associated throughout his career with a Romantic willingness to trust inspiration over the more guarded, ironic style fashionable among his peers.