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American Child
by Paul Engle, 1945, 1st ptg,12 mo,VG ins in poor DJ
66 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1945
About the author
Paul Engle
72 books1 followerEngle was a noted American poet, editor, teacher, literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He is perhaps best remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. During his tenure (1941–1965), he was responsible for luring some of the finest writers of the day to Iowa City. Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Kurt Vonnegut and other prominent authors served as faculty under Engle. Additionally, Engle increased enrollment and oversaw numerous students of future fame and influence, including Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver and Robert Bly.
Born Paul Hamilton Engle, he attended Coe College, The University of Iowa, Columbia University, and Oxford University (where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar). Engle's first poetry collection "Worn Earth" won the Yale Series of Younger Poets and his second, "American Song" (1934), was given a rave front-page review in the New York Times Book Review.
Born Paul Hamilton Engle, he attended Coe College, The University of Iowa, Columbia University, and Oxford University (where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar). Engle's first poetry collection "Worn Earth" won the Yale Series of Younger Poets and his second, "American Song" (1934), was given a rave front-page review in the New York Times Book Review.
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March 23, 2019
Judging from the slim number of ratings here at GoodReads, Paul Engle doesn’t get read much anymore. And his name probably doesn’t come up in conversation much either (even in Iowa City, home to the Writers’ Workshop), and that’s too bad because Engle deserves in his own small way to be mentioned along with names like Maxwell Perkins or Malcolm Cowley or William Shawn as a force behind the scenes guiding the development of Twentieth Century American fiction. His three decades at the helm of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop brought an impressive stable of talent to the University of Iowa to write and teach there, and the effects of what he helped create in Iowa City resonate throughout the body of American fiction and poetry from the second half of the Twentieth Century until today.
But despite all that, Engle’s own writing doesn’t hold up that well for most of today’s readers, and even early in his career in the ‘30s his optimism and declamatory style was already out of fashion, easy to deride as foolishly open-hearted and naïve. As a poet, he descends from Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, and he wears his roots from the heartland on his sleeve. Even Kurt Vonnegut, one of Engle’s draws to Iowa City, scorned him as a “hayseed clown” in a moment of unkindness published in 2012’s Letters. And Engle no doubt appeared that way to Vonnegut—he was an athletic, friendly man, big and robust, a product of Cedar Rapids—but he spent his life writing among writers, oversaw the Workshop during arguably its most talented years, and he created the International Writers’ Workshop which brought scores of international talent to the community of writers in Iowa City as well.
I met Engle once, during my mailman days. I brought a special delivery letter to his house on the bluff above Dubuque Street overlooking the river. He answered the door, signed for the letter and was friendly, still quite dynamic for a man in his late 70s or early 80s. He was a part of the framework of the Iowa City I grew up in, the rich, artistic tableaux that made it (and still makes it today) just about one of the best places (and the most literary) in all the world.
So here’s what I did on Sunday: back visiting Iowa City with my daughter, we got up that morning and walked along the river from the Iowa House, took the walkway up from the river by the old University High School building and then walked east along Fairchild through the north end neighborhood where Vonnegut lived in the late ‘60s. Our walk took us to Oakland Cemetery to look at the Black Angel and all the dead people I know there. And there tucked away on the south end of the cemetery is Paul Engle’s stone, and wonder of wonders his stone is gazing down the hill at Donald Justice, just three or four rows away. It’s like Iowa City has its own little Poet’s Corner right there in Oakland Cemetery.
So then my daughter and I walked back on Bloomington where I was surprised to find the Haunted Bookshop has moved into the house where Murphy-Brookfield Books was for so many years. And we browsed the shelves, and I found this attractive, signed copy of Engle’s American Child, his sonnet sequence of 64 poems written to his daughter. I took it back to the Iowa House and read it.
Engle’s sonnets touch on many of the elements that sonnet writers have explored since Petrarch: time and beauty and love and eternity, enormous, unwieldy concepts that the fourteen-line form of the sonnet allows the writer the chance to exert some control over, to make sense of in an orderly limited manner. And Engle has a masterly control of the sonnet form, and his poems echo many an early sonnet by Shakespeare and Spenser, but maybe even more so those by William Wordsworth because there is something entirely Romantic with a capital “R” about these poems, a recognition and a celebration of the simple and sadly transient beauty of childhood set against the beauties of the natural world. “Lucky the living child born in a land / Bordered by rivers of enormous flow,” the sequence begins with the first sonnet, “Missouri talking through its throat of sand, / Mississippi wide with ice and snow.” There is an intimate connection to the land here, the rich, black farmland of the Midwest, and at times Engle sounds much like Wordsworth, albeit not of the Lake District but of Iowa, which he sings and celebrates unabashedly though his daughter’s experience growing up in that fertile land: “She lives between those rivers as between / Her birth and death, and is in these bold days / A water-watched and river-radiant child” (I). Later in Sonnet X Engle writes, “She moves above the wide fields shiningly, / Loving the living earth where her feet run, / Making that whole land meaningful and wise.” Wordsworth called youth “nature’s priest,” and in these sonnets it seems Engle would agree.
Wordsworth wrote, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” and to his own young daughter he wrote, “Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, / And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, / God being with thee when we know it not.” And Engle seems to be channeling Wordsworth at many points throughout his sonnet sequence:
For all her life is the enormous now,
No time is in it, and no yesterday
Torments tomorrow asking why or how.
The intense instant is complete and right.
Forever is a place as far away
As the dark forest or tomorrow night. (XVII)
Engle’s sonnets are filled with an achingly powerful love for his young daughter whom he sees growing and changing, playing and running, slowly puzzling out the mysteries of the world around her: “She knows the natural earth of thing, but all / The human world is dreadfully ahead” (VIII). Gradually, the child awakens into the understandings of time and loss and death. But Engle celebrates the innocence of his daughter before the “shades of the prison house” begin to close upon her:
Growing old does not mean growing wise
But losing what was accurate and wild,
The savage sense of river, sound and sun.
Deafened by ears and blinded with our eyes,
We will forget the elemental child
Is made of earth, air, water, fire in one. (XII)
Engle’s sequence shows that gradual forgetting of the “elemental child,” as sickness and loss and goodbyes take a gradual toll on her innocence. There is the concern of the father for a sick child, an attempt to help her understand loss and the everyday troubles of broken dolls and Halloween and dying pets. But in the background is an even greater concern of a father for a daughter growing up in the ‘40s, the fascism in Europe, the “hysteria of hands and voice.” Engle brackets these sonnets of childhood and innocence with grimmer ones alluding to the dictatorships in Europe and the consoling himself that his daughter will not grow up with those fears in her life.
For me and my connections to Iowa City, this is a wonderful volume of poetry by a man whose significance in guiding the direction of American literature is unmistakable. And American Child becomes even more important to me in that I found it on a beautiful Sunday morning on a walk with my own daughter. Engle writes lines I would record for her here:
She is a miracle like daily light,
As warm, as moving as that luminous air.
Let her eyes never lose the daily sight
Of the sun’s great golden hand on face and hair. (XXXI)
Clearly, this sonnet sequence won’t appeal to everyone. I know that as a younger man I would have sneered at the sentimental writing here. There is, undoubtedly, a touch of what Vonnegut called the “hayseed” in these open-hearted poems from a father to his daughter, and despite the connections I have made to other writers, no one will mistake these sonnets for those of Shakespeare or Wordsworth. There is something entirely “Iowan” about these poems, and that’s not entirely a bad thing.
But despite all that, Engle’s own writing doesn’t hold up that well for most of today’s readers, and even early in his career in the ‘30s his optimism and declamatory style was already out of fashion, easy to deride as foolishly open-hearted and naïve. As a poet, he descends from Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, and he wears his roots from the heartland on his sleeve. Even Kurt Vonnegut, one of Engle’s draws to Iowa City, scorned him as a “hayseed clown” in a moment of unkindness published in 2012’s Letters. And Engle no doubt appeared that way to Vonnegut—he was an athletic, friendly man, big and robust, a product of Cedar Rapids—but he spent his life writing among writers, oversaw the Workshop during arguably its most talented years, and he created the International Writers’ Workshop which brought scores of international talent to the community of writers in Iowa City as well.
I met Engle once, during my mailman days. I brought a special delivery letter to his house on the bluff above Dubuque Street overlooking the river. He answered the door, signed for the letter and was friendly, still quite dynamic for a man in his late 70s or early 80s. He was a part of the framework of the Iowa City I grew up in, the rich, artistic tableaux that made it (and still makes it today) just about one of the best places (and the most literary) in all the world.
So here’s what I did on Sunday: back visiting Iowa City with my daughter, we got up that morning and walked along the river from the Iowa House, took the walkway up from the river by the old University High School building and then walked east along Fairchild through the north end neighborhood where Vonnegut lived in the late ‘60s. Our walk took us to Oakland Cemetery to look at the Black Angel and all the dead people I know there. And there tucked away on the south end of the cemetery is Paul Engle’s stone, and wonder of wonders his stone is gazing down the hill at Donald Justice, just three or four rows away. It’s like Iowa City has its own little Poet’s Corner right there in Oakland Cemetery.
So then my daughter and I walked back on Bloomington where I was surprised to find the Haunted Bookshop has moved into the house where Murphy-Brookfield Books was for so many years. And we browsed the shelves, and I found this attractive, signed copy of Engle’s American Child, his sonnet sequence of 64 poems written to his daughter. I took it back to the Iowa House and read it.
Engle’s sonnets touch on many of the elements that sonnet writers have explored since Petrarch: time and beauty and love and eternity, enormous, unwieldy concepts that the fourteen-line form of the sonnet allows the writer the chance to exert some control over, to make sense of in an orderly limited manner. And Engle has a masterly control of the sonnet form, and his poems echo many an early sonnet by Shakespeare and Spenser, but maybe even more so those by William Wordsworth because there is something entirely Romantic with a capital “R” about these poems, a recognition and a celebration of the simple and sadly transient beauty of childhood set against the beauties of the natural world. “Lucky the living child born in a land / Bordered by rivers of enormous flow,” the sequence begins with the first sonnet, “Missouri talking through its throat of sand, / Mississippi wide with ice and snow.” There is an intimate connection to the land here, the rich, black farmland of the Midwest, and at times Engle sounds much like Wordsworth, albeit not of the Lake District but of Iowa, which he sings and celebrates unabashedly though his daughter’s experience growing up in that fertile land: “She lives between those rivers as between / Her birth and death, and is in these bold days / A water-watched and river-radiant child” (I). Later in Sonnet X Engle writes, “She moves above the wide fields shiningly, / Loving the living earth where her feet run, / Making that whole land meaningful and wise.” Wordsworth called youth “nature’s priest,” and in these sonnets it seems Engle would agree.
Wordsworth wrote, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” and to his own young daughter he wrote, “Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, / And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, / God being with thee when we know it not.” And Engle seems to be channeling Wordsworth at many points throughout his sonnet sequence:
For all her life is the enormous now,
No time is in it, and no yesterday
Torments tomorrow asking why or how.
The intense instant is complete and right.
Forever is a place as far away
As the dark forest or tomorrow night. (XVII)
Engle’s sonnets are filled with an achingly powerful love for his young daughter whom he sees growing and changing, playing and running, slowly puzzling out the mysteries of the world around her: “She knows the natural earth of thing, but all / The human world is dreadfully ahead” (VIII). Gradually, the child awakens into the understandings of time and loss and death. But Engle celebrates the innocence of his daughter before the “shades of the prison house” begin to close upon her:
Growing old does not mean growing wise
But losing what was accurate and wild,
The savage sense of river, sound and sun.
Deafened by ears and blinded with our eyes,
We will forget the elemental child
Is made of earth, air, water, fire in one. (XII)
Engle’s sequence shows that gradual forgetting of the “elemental child,” as sickness and loss and goodbyes take a gradual toll on her innocence. There is the concern of the father for a sick child, an attempt to help her understand loss and the everyday troubles of broken dolls and Halloween and dying pets. But in the background is an even greater concern of a father for a daughter growing up in the ‘40s, the fascism in Europe, the “hysteria of hands and voice.” Engle brackets these sonnets of childhood and innocence with grimmer ones alluding to the dictatorships in Europe and the consoling himself that his daughter will not grow up with those fears in her life.
For me and my connections to Iowa City, this is a wonderful volume of poetry by a man whose significance in guiding the direction of American literature is unmistakable. And American Child becomes even more important to me in that I found it on a beautiful Sunday morning on a walk with my own daughter. Engle writes lines I would record for her here:
She is a miracle like daily light,
As warm, as moving as that luminous air.
Let her eyes never lose the daily sight
Of the sun’s great golden hand on face and hair. (XXXI)
Clearly, this sonnet sequence won’t appeal to everyone. I know that as a younger man I would have sneered at the sentimental writing here. There is, undoubtedly, a touch of what Vonnegut called the “hayseed” in these open-hearted poems from a father to his daughter, and despite the connections I have made to other writers, no one will mistake these sonnets for those of Shakespeare or Wordsworth. There is something entirely “Iowan” about these poems, and that’s not entirely a bad thing.
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