Hall wasn’t too intimidated by the great to note their all-too-human moments of vanity and competitiveness. Dessert consists of a “mound of Fritos” poured from the package onto his tray: “I like Fritos,” Moore says, “They’re so nutritious.” With the poets Hall writes about, however, the gaiety of age sometimes takes grotesque forms as he writes, he discovered that “the great were weird.” Marianne Moore, living on her own in a rapidly decaying part of Brooklyn, serves him a lunch consisting of a few raisins, a few peanuts, three saltines, and a quarter of a canned peach, each served in its own pleated paper cupcake liner. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, It’s an emblem of the artist on life’s journey, and Yeats concludes by insisting that even when the art is sad, the artist is fundamentally content: The Yeats poem where Hall found that title, “Lapis Lazuli,” is about a Chinese gem carving that shows three old musicians climbing a mountain. It is this book that now returns in a third version as Old Poets, having grown and evolved over the decades along with its author. In 1978 Hall published a book of reminiscences of these encounters, Remembering Poets 14 years later, he brought out a new, expanded edition under the title Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, a phrase borrowed from Yeats. ’47, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore, who had once been the bomb-throwing rebels of Modernism. In the late 1940s and 1950s, as an undergraduate at Harvard, a graduate student at Oxford, and then back at Harvard as a junior member of the Society of Fellows, Hall seized every opportunity to meet what he called the “bishops” of midcentury poetry-revered figures like T.S. Long before Hall became an old poet himself, he was an ambitious novice besotted with old poets. So the posthumous publication of a new book by Hall titled Old Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions feels highly appropriate-especially because it’s actually an old book in a new guise. But he had an instinctive sense that it was the part that mattered most. Hall wouldn’t necessarily have echoed Browning: he wrote too much about grief and mourning to believe that the last part of life is the best. Robert Browning’s once-famous invitation-“Grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be,/The last of life, for which the first was made”-would find few takers today. That makes him a rarity in American culture, where getting old is usually regarded as a faux pas, something to be staved off with diet and exercise as long as possible and then hidden with plastic surgery. The earliest poem he chose to include in The Selected Poems of Donald Hall, “My Son, My Executioner,” is about how becoming a parent brings old age closer, even for parents as young as Hall and his first wife, Kirby: “We twenty-five and twenty-two,/Who seemed to live forever,/Observe enduring life in you/And start to die together.” In one of the last poems in the book, Affirmation, Hall wrote about that journey from the other end: “To grow old is to lose everything./Aging, everybody knows it.”Īs these lines suggest, Hall wrote about age without illusions, but also without embarrassment. Some of the best-loved poets in English have been doomed to eternal youth, from Thomas Chatterton in the eighteenth century to Sylvia Plath in the twentieth.ĭonald Hall ’51, who died in 2018 a few months shy of 90, was one of the rare poets with the opposite destiny: he was born to write about aging and being old. If John Keats hadn’t died at 25 of tuberculosis, he might have gone on to write great poems about marriage, parenthood, and middle age since he never got the chance, he is forever a poet of adolescent exuberance and melancholy, of ambitions and dreams. When poets die young, youthfulness comes to seem like the essence of their work, the thing they were born to write about.