April is National Poetry Month, and given our degree in poesy writin' from the Ozarks Famous Writers School, we though we might post about poets with connections to Southern Minnesota. Hearts need nurturing as well as bodies, to steal from an old labor song.
What better place to start than that seemingly most prosaic of cities, Austin? Richard Eberhart, who died in 2005 at 101, was born and raised in Spamtown. His obituary in the New York Times states:
Richard Ghormley Eberhart was born on April 5, 1904, in Austin, Minn. His father was a vice president of the George A. Hormel meatpacking company, and Richard grew up on his family's 40-acre estate, Burr Oaks, whose name he used as the title of volume of poems in 1947.
When Richard was 18, his mother died of cancer. Shortly afterward, his father lost his fortune. These experiences, Mr. Eberhart would later say, helped make him a poet.
Mr. Eberhart spent a year at the University of Minnesota before transferring to Dartmouth, where he earned bachelor's degree in English in 1926. After graduating, he traveled the world on a tramp freighter, ending up in England, where he earned a second bachelor's degree, from Cambridge University, in 1929. He later received a master's degree from Cambridge and did postgraduate work at Harvard.
The Times quoted a portion of a lovely poem that's perfect for a day like today; unfortunately, we don't have the entire piece in our home library:
This fevers me
This fevers me, this sun on green,
On grass glowing, this young spring.
The secret hallowing is come,
Regenerate sudden incarnation,
Mystery made visible
In growth, yet subtly veiled in all,
Ununderstandable in grass,
In flowers, and in the human heart,
This lyric mortal loveliness,
The earth breathing, and the sun.
Perhaps Eberhart's best known poems are "The Groundhog" and "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment." He is interviewed and reads a short selection of poems in an audio file here.
Comments