Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Thanks and praise to Daisy Fried for her essay about Kenneth Fearing [“Not Yet,” February 2013]. Fearing is a terrific poet — even better, I think, than Fried suggests. Fried’s insightfully paradoxical remark that Fearing conveys “conviction, mocking the whole idea of conviction” points toward the comic-painful ambivalence that runs so deep in Fearing, a poet who saw through a million shams but still yearned (like any poet worth our time) to feel that love and honor are not mere pipe dreams. And he is not as narrow as the standard summary of  his work alleges. It’s true that more than half of  his poems grimly and sardonically ponder “the American dream gone wrong,” as Fried says; but that is a huge subject when conceived as deeply and empathetically as Fearing conceives it. Anyway, there are dozens and dozens of strong Fearing poems that can’t simply be categorized as critiques of capitalism. Instead of looking only at Fearing’s most quoted poem “Dirge,” I wish Fried had called attention to some of his stranger and more inward poems, such as “Memo,” “Tomorrow,” “Requiem,” “Scheherazade,” “5 am,” “Class Reunion,” “Certified Life,” “4 am,” “Spotlight” — and many more.

So I think enthusiasm for Kenneth Fearing is no mistake — and 
I squint at Fried’s confident statement that he is not a “major” poet. “Major” is such a fishy word, as Christopher Ricks has persuasively
argued; let’s remember that one generation’s “major” figures are likely to be viewed as also-rans two generations later. Fearing is not as great as, say, Frost or Stevens or Eliot, but among Americans of  the next generation (born in the first quarter of the twentieth 
century), Fearing is, for me, the best poet. There is gigantic greatness (Shakespeare) and there is narrow greatness (Hopkins) — and greatness of any scope doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.