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The Fading Smile

By Peter Davison
The Fading Smile by Peter Davison digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

"A beautiful and richly instructive book, a worthy and welcome sequel to Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth."

Louis S. Auchincloss

An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all, of the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston through the half-decade beginning in 1955. That was the year Peter Davison, coming to Boston as a book editor. was swept up in a world -- in a tumult -- of poetry. He rediscovered his father's old friend Robert Frost. He briefly squired Sylvia Plath. He came to know Robert Lowell (whose poems and private disasters dominated the period) and Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur. Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, and others who, closely bound together in friendship or rivalry or both, defined the shape of American poetry at mid-century Through their eves as well as his own, and often in their words, Davison presents a sharply fresh vision of the shift from confidence to a troubled questioning that overtook America -- a transformation that was, in a sense, foreshadowed in the sensibilities, in the writings, sometimes in the lives, of some of our finest poets.

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About Peter Davison

Peter Davison has hart a long and distinguished career as a poet and as a book publisher. He was born in New York and raised in Colorado, and attended Harvard and Cambridge universities. He became an editor in book publishing at twenty-two; from 1956 to 1985 he edited books for the Atlantic Monthly Press and now does so for his own imprint at Houghton Mifflin Company. He is poetry editor for The Atlantic Monthly. His first book of poems won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1963, and since then he has published eight additional volumes, including The Great Ledge (1989). He lives in Boston and is married to the architect Joan Edelman Goody.

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