Poets Mourn the Passing of a Great Voice: Hayden Carruth
Wednesday October 1, 2008
The news is flashing around the poetry mailing lists: we’ve lost one of the great American poetic voices, Hayden Carruth, who died at his home on Monday at age 87 after suffering several strokes. 
I never met him, but I remember him as the editor of the anthology that introduced me as a young college student to modern American poetry: The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the 20th Century (first published in 1970, and still available in a reissue from Bantam Classics, 
). Since then I’ve come to know and love many of the poems of this most forthright, open-hearted, humane and wonderfully cantankerous of poets. He would most definitely have had something incisive to say about the current machinations in the U.S. government — witness this small poem from his Web site:
I never met him, but I remember him as the editor of the anthology that introduced me as a young college student to modern American poetry: The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the 20th Century (first published in 1970, and still available in a reissue from Bantam Classics, ). Since then I’ve come to know and love many of the poems of this most forthright, open-hearted, humane and wonderfully cantankerous of poets. He would most definitely have had something incisive to say about the current machinations in the U.S. government — witness this small poem from his Web site:
ECONOMICSHe will be missed, not only by the poets who had the luck to study with him, but by all his readers.
Well, Mr. C, he’s somewhat weird.
Worms are living in his beard.
He gives them to the fisher trade
Who bring him trout and pike and bass
With which his hunger is allayed
While he sits comfy on his ass.
More on Hayden Carruth:
Our biographical profile of Hayden Carruth, with links to buy his books
Comments
eye never heard of Lord Baltimore before Hayden Carruth
iff he was remembered in love it should be enough
no tribute would ring true without truth
you said you would miss the poor poems
of this wonderful bard
thats enough
eye will too