This Blessed Earth: New and Selected Poems, 1927-1977

John Hall Wheelock, the American lyric poet, is probably best remembered, in the words of P. G. Woodhouse, as "the man who wrote the poem about having a black panther caged within his breast." Certainly he is one of the most under appreciated American poets of his generation. Wheelock graduated Harvard in 1908 as editor of the Harvard Monthly and the class poet. Eventually he would rise to become senior editor at Charles Scribner and Sons, where he worked with Thomas Wolfe and James Truslow Adams, but mainly he wrote verse. In 1936, his published volume of Collected Works was awarded the Golden Rose by the New England Poetry Society, as that year's most distinguished contribution to American poetry. In 1962 Wheelock won the Bollingen Prize and in 1972 he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Poetry Society of America for notable achievement in poetry. "This Blessed Earth" collects poems that were published between 1927 (although, some, like "Aphrodite" were written as early as 1906), and 1977, a year before Wheelock's death. As Wheelock once said, "in poetry, words are employed more as an end, and less as a means merely, than is the case with prose." His poetry, such as "Night Thought in Ages," is lyrical without taking full flight. Ironically, more than any of his poems I have used instead Wheelock's description of the role of the poet: "The statements of science are hearsay, reports from a world outside