Many of the most accomplished novelists in the English language began their writing career as poets. From the past: Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce, Willa Cather, Graham Greene, Stephen Crane. More recently: Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Alice Walker. Each of these writers' first books were poetry collections, though they are almost exclusively known today for their fiction.
As a poet who is now writing a novel, I'm eager to find good role models. I'm also curious about what this relationship between poetry and fiction means about great writing and great writers. Is there something about poetry that sets a strong foundation for fiction? Is poetry the province of the young, a "self-indulgent" activity, as Brontë put it? Or is poetry the more difficult genre, as Faulkner famously admitted when he said he was a "failed poet"?
Poetry is my first love, and what I studied for my MFA. I find that reading and writing poetry helps me focus and generate creativity when I sit down to work on my novel about the antiquarian book world.
I write as a means toward discovery. I collect as a means toward discovery, too.
Ernest Hemingway “Wanderings: ‘Mitrailliatrice’, ‘Oily Weather’, ‘Roosevelt’, ‘Riparto d'Assalto’, ‘Champs d'Honneur’, ‘Chapter Heading'” from Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Chicago, January 1923.
Hemingway's six poems published here under the heading 'Wanderings' were all included in his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, published eight months later. At the time Poetry published these, Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, had been living in Paris for two years and were about to find out they were pregnant with their first child. This first edition is the earliest publication of the future Nobel Prize winner's poems.
*"Mitrailliatrice" is Italian for "machine gun."
Dorothy Sayers, "Lay" Aldous Huxley, "Home-sickness...From the Town" J.R. R. Tolkien, "Goblin Feet"
From Oxford Poetry. Oxford, 1915.
What's most remarkable about this journal is the proximity of three future critically acclaimed novelists, all of whom were Oxford students at the time. Sayers published her first book, a collection of poems titled Op. I, the following year, as did Huxley with The Burning Wheel. Tolkien's poem, "Goblin Feet," has echoes of the fantasy world readers would come to love twenty-three years later in his first book, The Hobbit.
