Updike, John. (1932–2009)
Interesting Signed Letter to Henry Chapin
Typed letter, signed "John Updike" on the author's Georgetown, MA letterhead. November 25 [no year]. 1 page. Very fine. A highly interesting letter about Chapin's manuscript of poems, the art of poetry and the market for poetry. In part: "I have read here and there with pleasure and admiration, missing only perhaps the compression, the mad sudden verbal precision, that we get with the great poets, Shakespeare above all. Lines like these from 'Morning Song' -- 'Someone set it going, wound up the small fowl / to loop the airs, mad with exuberance, swaying the lovely tree-tops with their song.' -- have something of the surprisingness and momentum I mean, and that I can recognize but can produce no more easily than the next man. Poetry is a moot matter, especially nowadays, and though I can truthfully say your poems gave me more pleasure than many published volumes, this doesn't mean I can point to a sure path for their publication. I myself would not be able to bring out an occasional volume of verse, I dare say, if it were not for the hope of profit that my prose holds out to my publishers. Fine young poets like our firends Bailey have given it up entirely, I gather. You are to be admired for remaining true to this most bewitching of muses. My publisher, Knopf, would surely give your book scrutiny, but I know their own list of poetry and small-sales volums has shrunk like many another's under the new corporate focus on the bottom line (in accounting, not, alas, verse)."A remarkable letter from the American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic, one of only three authors (the others being Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.
Henry Chapin (1894 - 1983), was the author of a half- dozen volumes of poetry and four books on the ecology of man and the sea. In addition to Updike, his literary friends included Robert Frost and Robert Graves. (6381)
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