“Henry Weinfield’s poems startle us with their formal beauty and mesmerizing cadence. Their intense clarity is at once moving and richly polyvalent. Legacies abound, from the Metaphysicals through Mallarmé and on to Stevens and Bronk. Weinfield writes that “to be is but the form of to desire.” With immaculate diction and often biting wit, these poems exhibit an almost paradisical perfection of that desiring.”
– Michael Heller

“Few poets have a mind broad enough and a heart sufficiently large to speak meaningfully to their contemporaries. Even fewer remember their poetic ancestry. Henry Weinfield possesses both these missing qualities. In his poems we hear echoes of voices that sang centuries ago. Homer and the writer(s) of Genesis, Dante, Tasso and Milton, Holderlin, Mallarme, and Eliot. Still he sings in his own voice for our own time.”
– Louis Dupré

“Can poetry, ‘Hallowed and hollowed out of emptiness’, still participate in the philosophical quest for a ground of being? The fact that Weinfield even poses such questions indicates how distinct his sensibility is from that of most poets today.”
– Norman Finkelstein

An Excerpt

WITHOUT MYTHOLOGIES

Without mythologies the leaves are blown
Hither and yon, seeds sown and flowers grown:
They do it on their own without mythologies.

Without mythologies they wax and wane,
Neither complain nor hasten to explain,
Since everything is plain without mythologies.

Without mythologies when day is done
Under the sun, songs sung and races run,
A new one is begun without mythologies.

About the Author

Henry Weinfield is the author of The Sorrows of Eros and Other Poems (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) and of three other collections of poetry. His verse-translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony, done in collaboration with Catherine Schlegel, is available from the University of Michigan Press and his translation of Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet sequence, The Chimeras, with monoprints by the artist Douglas Kinsey, from Spuyten-Duyvil. He is the author of a translation of and commentary on the Collected Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé (University of California Press, 1995) and of a critical study, The Poet without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History (Southern Illinois UP, 1991). His book, The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press,” and he is working on a study of the blank-verse tradition in English poetry from Milton to Stevens. Henry Weinfield is professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

An Excerpt

Slowly the seasons circle and converge.
Summer’s assumptions fall beneath the surge
Of wind that widens in its withering.
Late-winter blurring into early-spring
Summons the Wanderer in his own blood,
Bursts through whatever bulwarks had withstood
The pulse of passion rushing to the void –
Till all delineations are destroyed.

Why should the Wanderer pursue his course,
Season by season, searching for a source,
And slowly circle like an old refrain
From east to west and west to east again –
Summer to autumn; autumn, winter; spring –
If nothing comes of all his wandering?

About the Author

Henry Weinfield is the author of The Sorrows of Eros and Other Poems (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) and of three other collections of poetry. His verse-translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony, done in collaboration with Catherine Schlegel, is available from the University of Michigan Press and his translation of Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet sequence, The Chimeras, with monoprints by the artist Douglas Kinsey, from Spuyten-Duyvil. He is the author of a translation of and commentary on the Collected Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé (University of California Press, 1995) and of a critical study, The Poet without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History (Southern Illinois UP, 1991). His book, The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press,” and he is working on a study of the blank-verse tradition in English poetry from Milton to Stevens. Henry Weinfield is professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame.