JOHN HOLMES: POET AND FRIEND OF POETRY
1904-1962
by
Doris Holmes Eyges, widow of the poet
John Holmes,
member of the First Parish in Cambridge, Harvard Square,
was a poet. The record is there in the published volumes
of his work. After Along the Row, based on his
undergraduate days at Tufts, Holmes' first major publication
was Address to the Living, which came out in 1937
with the only blurb Robert Frost ever wrote. Much of Holmes’
humorous and light verse appeared in The New Yorker
and was collected in Fair Warning in 1939. Map
of My Country, from 1943, when the U.S. was at war,
was adopted by the Navy for inclusion in the libraries
of its ships and stations. Copies that survive in second-hand
bookstores or personal libraries often have water stains
or pages rippled by dampness. Unitarian Universalists
familiar with Hymns for the Celebration of Life
can find four hymns whose words are poems of John Holmes
from the thirties and forties. The Double Root,
1950, The Symbols, 1955, and The Fortune Teller,
a National Book Award nomination 1961, were all books
of his own poems.He also produced textbooks, anthologies,
and books of literary criticism.
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John
Holmes with Carl Sandburg, June 1955
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The greatest contribution
of John Holmes, however, may have been the extraordinary
impact he had on the lives of other poets. As a college
teacher, of course, he influenced his students. His lifelong
profession of poetry at Tufts resulted in the remarkable
loyalty of hundreds of graduates. Holmes brought distinguished
living poets to the Tufts campus long before poetry readings
and poets-in-residence became a standard feature of academia.
He organized workshops, summer conferences, adult education
courses, but maybe even more important, parties, late night
conversations, morning coffee -- for poetry, poetry, poetry.
Holmes
was a charismatic man, tall, quiet, pipe-smoking, tweedy,
serious. Dozens of people wrote that John Holmes meant something
to them that mother, spouse, child, psychoanalyst could
not equal. At the time of Holmes’s death in 1962 hundreds
of letters of sad tribute arrived from eminent writers,
from modest neighborhood housewives, from Tufts students.
In the larger world of literature, he was a powerful encourager
of poets. John Ciardi, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, George
Starbuck, Philip Booth are some of those who record their
gratitude to him. Uniquely free of competitiveness, John
Holmes simply loved to have poetry happen. In the Boston
area he was unmatched as an enabler of poetry in the mid-twentieth
century.
John Albert Holmes, Jr. was born in Somerville, Massachusetts,
on January 6, 1904, the eldest of four children of John
Albert Holmes and Mary Florence Murdock Holmes. The senior
Mr. Holmes was a civil engineer who built dams and bridges
in New England and the South. Both parents came from old
New England families. Mr. Holmes, an amateur genealogist,
traced the records carefully to seventeenth century English
settlers in Braintree, Massachusetts.
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John
and Doris Holmes, August 1960
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John Holmes, the
poet, used the simple form of his name. He went to public
elementary and high schools in Somerville. At his high school
graduation the speaker was the president of Tufts College,
John Cousens. Impressed by the young man who read his own
poem at the ceremonies, Cousens persuaded him to attend
the college on the hill nearby in Medford. After graduation
from Tufts in 1929, Holmes studied at Harvard and then taught
at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania where one of
his colleagues, a contemporary and friend, was the poet
Theodore Roethke. There, too, he met his first wife, Sarah
Frances Ludlow. A job opened at Tufts and the young couple
moved back to Massachusetts in 1934.
These were busy years for the teacher/poet. He wrote every
day. His habit was to start with letters, and then proceed
to the real thing, the poem of the moment, as a four finger
typist. Invitations came to give lectures, and to review
books.
For eight years Holmes served as poetry editor of the Boston
Evening Transcript. A particular chum there was Howard
Mumford Jones, Harvard English professor specializing in
American Literature. During a spell when Holmes had a scarcity
of books of verse to review, he and Jones decided to make
up a poet. They took the middle names of two secretaries
and concocted Preston Gurney. Holmes would refer to him
in a column, or compare the fictional Gurney with some actual
versifier being reviewed. One day Holmes was in Goodspeed’s
book shop under the Old South Church. A clerk took a book
down off the shelf and handed it to him saying, “You
write so much about this poet I figured I should set this
aside for you.” Holmes thought Jones was going to an
awful lot of trouble to play this joke on him. But, no,
it was a slim volume published about 1900 by Preston Gurney.
Here began a saga that included detective work and the discovery
that the real Gurney had been a Baptist clergyman, a prominent
graduate of Brown University. The story was told many times
and at virtually every occasion someone in the audience
said, “My mother’s maiden name was Gurney,”
or “He lived in Wollaston,” or “look up at
that window,” the last being a stained glass memorial
to Gurney in a chapel where Holmes was recounting the accumulating
narrative.
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John
and Doris Holmes with their son,
John Ludlow Holmes
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Stained glass
was an interest of John Holmes. He became a fan and friend
of Charles Connick whose Boston studio was the source of
many beautiful church, school, hospital, and library windows
from the Arts and Crafts period onwards. Once every year
John Holmes would take his poetry class to visit the studio.
The Connick Stained Glass Foundation is mounting an exhibition
at Boston University in 2002.
In 1936
John Ludlow Holmes was born to John and Sarah Holmes. For
Holmes, family was more than sentimental attachment. It
was mythology, part of the substance that generated the
workings and the products of the imaginative life. The young
child, his sounds, his shining blond hair, the new consciousness
in the world, became poems. In the more informal realm of
family correspondence Holmes was a daily, prolific, detailed
and humorous writer. He wrote to newborns describing what
they were getting into, to mothers-in-law savoring their
special insights, to little girls, addressing their fantasy
playmates. Sixteen years of weekly letters to his brother
survive.
Sarah Holmes died in 1947. A year later John Holmes married
Doris Vivian Kirk, a young colleague in his department.
Evan Kirk Holmes was born in 1950 and Margaret Nash Holmes
in 1954. A rich, full season for the poet came during what
was to be this last decade of his life.
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Holmes
with wife Doris, and John, Evan, and Margaret
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Four times Holmes
was the commencement Phi Beta Kappa speaker: at Tufts, Brown,
William and Mary, and Harvard. For Harvard’s ceremonies
in 1956 he composed a strong original piece called “The
Eleventh Commandment.” He served as president of the
New England Poetry Club and was an active member of the
Academy of American Poets. He judged contests, such as the
Shelley and Lamont awards. He directed summer writers’
conferences at Chautauqua, New York, at Tufts and the University
of New Hampshire. Holmes was elected to the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and he was awarded an honorary degree
by Tufts University.
More intense
than the public associations were two poetry workshops that
grew up around John Holmes. The first began in 1949. Its
regulars were John Ciardi, Richard Eberhart, May Sarton,
and Richard Wilbur. They met in each other’s homes
to read, analyze, and criticize their current poems. Not
surprisingly, such vigorous creative people manifested very
different personalities that sometimes clashed. Ciardi had
been a student of Holmes at Tufts and was a bit edgy in
his determination not to show influence or dependency on
this father figure. Ciardi had a very masculine orientation
toward poetry. Teaching at Harvard, this son of immigrants
had been a gunner in the Air Force in World War II. He had
little tolerance for the sweeter lyrics of May Sarton, product
of European education after schooling in Cambridge where
her father was a Harvard historian of science. Eberhart
of the round cheeks and sunny countenance enjoyed self-contained
confidence in his poems that had already moved from aerial
bombardment to sailing in Maine. Wilbur was a prize-winning
maker of beautifully formed poems that evoked everything
from art history to the nuances of married life in the mid-twentieth
century. But Holmes was the generous arbitrator who kept
it all going till jobs or life changes resulted in geographical
moves.
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Holmes
with Robert Frost
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-photo
courtesy of Tuftonia Magazine
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In 1958 the intellectual
and stylistic modes of poetry had changed markedly to a
more candid, less celebratory idiom that was soon to develop
into revolutionary confessional language. John Holmes was
once more the father of a small workshop that included Samuel
Albert, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, George Starbuck. Perhaps
the two women, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize, were
best known, but this group of five along with the writers
in the earlier workshop produced well over a hundred books,
most of which received praise from eminent critics and other
honors. Memoirs or biographical writings about these poets,
as well as those of the earlier workshop, record the joyous,
pallid to fiery, negative and positive criticism of the
members, but they are uniform in their recognition of the
encouragement of Holmes.
In 1999 Tufts
University put on a splendid day of celebration of the opening
of the John Holmes collection in the Tisch Library. A generous
gift from an alumnus, Winslow Duke, had resulted in a professional
ordering of books, papers, albums, photographs and other
memorabilia. On a bright day in September, family, friends,
poets, librarian as well as the President and Provost of
the University participated in a chapel program and a poetry
walk where fans and descendants read poems of John Holmes
at sites connected with the writing. One of those was the
rock on which John Ciardi had placed a memorial plaque quoting
a line of John Holmes that expresses his love of life, literature
and that place:
This is this world, the kingdom I was looking for.
Click here to view books about John Holmes on Amazon
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