Excerpt:
Helen Pinkerton
“She has written some of the best poems of her generation,” says poet and scholar Timothy Steele, ’70. Pinkerton’s mentor, Yvor Winters, deemed her “a master of poetic style and of her material. No poet in English writes with more authority.” The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, calling her style “austere,” notes that “her carefully crafted poetry is profoundly philosophical and religious.”
....“I think the kids today aren’t learning the art of poetry. They’re told that everybody can be a poet,” she says. “Not everybody is capable of being a poet —just like everybody isn’t capable of being a fine ballet dancer or a fine pianist.”...
Pinkerton was born in Butte, Mont. Her father was a copper miner; her mother had been raised in an orphanage—“or whatever is the politically correct term nowadays,” she qualifies. When Pinkerton was 11, her father was killed in a mining accident, leaving her mother to rear four children, including two teenage boys and a 6-year-old girl. The death created a decade-long crisis of faith for Pinkerton, whose parents were Catholics. Perhaps this is one reason faith is a running theme of her poems. She describes her central concerns as Thomistic—focused on St. Thomas Aquinas’s “questions of being and existence.”...
Meeting [Yvor]Winters turned her aspirations upside-down. “I discovered a whole new world, which was the serious writing of poetry,” she says...
A second turning point occurred a few years later, when she read Moby Dick on an ocean liner going to Europe after completing her master’s. It became the subject of her 1987 scholarly work, Melville’s Confidence Man and American Politics in the 1850s—and of a number of her long narrative poems. “I gave a lot of my life to Melville,” she says.
But poetry always came first...............~Cynthia Havens
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