Letter composed by Dr. Jon Miller
-accompanying the gift of "Modern American and British Poetry" by Louis Untermeyer
J--------,
This is much too small a token to repay all the... [personal details omitted by the editor]
The book is for me a special one; it has even been a dangerous one. Perhaps because of your present course, it will be equally special, equally dangerous for you also. It is an old book, not old enough to be antiquarian, but old enough to be well used. I have a number of editions of it in my collection; I acquire them whenever I see them, and I don't see them very often anymore. I have given one or two to other students whom I though might care. I even gave on once as a wedding present. The couple still speaks to me. you are getting a copy of what for me is the most special edition of all. The smooth, faded blue cloth and the beveled edges are just as they are on my mother's copy of this same edition. I wonder if the $3.50, once penciled into the corner of the front free-fly, that I erased, was the original price. Does it seem a bit high for the depression? Anyway, no other book, regardless of price, has contributed so much to my own lo e of poetry.
I will tell you the story that I have told to most of the others upon whom I have inflicted other copies. The telling, too, is this time all the more special because of the connections of our families... [personal details omitted.]
When I was growing up, my family spent several weeks each summer in the home of my grandparents in the small, very small, town of Alden, Iowa. Small towns are wonderful for small children. We could go anywhere, do anything. The few shops along Main Street were much more accessible to us than any of Durham's larger, grander stores. Your Grandmother will remember that Durham was in those days "the city of exciting stores." The river running through Alden was all that a river could be, complete with falls; Alden was, the sign said, " the best town by a dam site." There were open spaces, and there were lots of other children at loose ends ready to catch fireflies or to play auntie (anti or ante)-over or hide and seek. Iowa itself is glorious in summer -- the jet-black earth producing a deep, lush green everywhere and all set beneath an endless blue sky. It was a sensuous place. However, by the time that I was finishing high school, things had changed a bit. The black, green, and blue were as dazzling as before; but the shops now seemed very small and much emptier; and one-time playmates had summer jobs and were little interested in "geekier," "nerdier" city folk. I retreated into my grandparent's house - a large, old house built in 1870 by a retired farmer come to town. It frequently smelled of ginger and clove from my grandmother's cookie baking or of coffee which endlessly brewed. My uncle, a pianist, practiced eight or so hours everyday, providing every activity a soundtrack. Family came together joyously and chaotically at mealtimes and in the evenings, but there were long spaces of time to be filled. I found myself often in my uncle's room upstairs. It was large and dark and quiet except for the Chopin or Rachmaninov wafting up and in. There, in the bookcase, I found the 1936 copy of Untermeyer used by my mother in a college course she had taken at Drake. It was the perfect place, the perfect time, to encounter the green freedom" of Stevens' "Sunday Morning," the most sensuous of all poems. Later, I was dumbfounded to read a very different, longer version in my own modern poetry class at Davidson. In Untermeyer, too, I first tried to read Marianne Moore, whom I later met, and many other singers perhaps smaller to whom time has not been so kind, poets such as Wylie, and Teasdale and Lindsay and Robinson and Brooke and Sassoon. Reading these poems, aimlessly at first and then by choice, not because they were assigned or because there was to be a test taken or because someone had suggested them, allowed them to do their magic slowly, to become richly musical; and maybe in some small way, it made them mine. Of course, I still have mother's copy; and just in the last several years, I have included a couple of Peter Viereck poems into a WWII unit for American Studies -- poems I first happened upon decades ago in my own copy of the 1950 edition.
Clearly, this is a book that I love for both its contents and associations; it, certainly, is a book that I have spent many loose and glorious hours with. I hope that you also find some pleasure in it as well as a few special friends to visit and revisit for as long as I have visited my own friends there.
Thanks once more for all you have done for me this year and for being yourself a good friend.
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