The name of Robert Mezey, poet, translator, and teacher has always been proudly associated with Kenyon College—with pride on both sides, as he followed in the footsteps of his teacher, John Crowe Ransom, and illustrious friends and classmates James Wright and E.L. Doctorow.
When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s, we read Mezey’s poems in his book The Lovemaker (1960) with admiration, hoping that we might also in some way become a part of that tradition that included Robert Lowell and James Wright. What hardly any of us realized is that while Mezey attended Kenyon in the early fifties, he left before graduating. He served in the army before getting his diploma at the University of Iowa in 1959, and going on to graduate studies at Stanford. So completely did he embody the values and complex character of this liberal arts college, in his career as a writer and teacher, we think of him to this day as “a Kenyon Writer.”
Robert Mezey was born in Philadelphia in 1935, and was drawn to Kenyon by the presence of Ransom and The Kenyon Review, as Robert Lowell and Peter Taylor had been in 1940. In Doctorow’s affectionate memoir “James Wright at Kenyon” he describes the collegial atmosphere in which the young writers learned from one another: “There were actually several fine undergraduate poets in residence—Robert Mezey was one—but Wright was their model. . . . Besides the genuine poets such as Wright and Mezey there were several poetasters, pretenders who had none of the talent but all of the requisite sensibility . . .” There are always pretenders, and they are a requisite part of the community too. But Mezey, like Wright, was the real thing.
So I am pleased to carry myself from sorrow to sorrow
As the shepherd his littlest sheep from pasture to pasture
And he eats a few figs, to keep the breath in his body.
He started publishing poems in The Kenyon Review in 1954. His first book, The Lovemaker, won the prestigious Lamont Prize. He would go on to publish a dozen books, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. As an editor, he published the most widely used poetry anthology of his generation, Naked Poetry (1969). As a translator, with Richard Barnes, he translated the Complete Poems of Jorge Luis Borges. His Collected Poems 1952-1999 received the 2002 Poet’s Prize.
His academic career included positions at Case Western Reserve and Franklin Marshall College. From 1976 until his retirement in 1999 he was Professor of English at Pomona College.
I participated in a poetry reading with Robert Mezey many years ago, on the occasion of the inauguration of President Robert Oden. What I remember most about the poet, in addition to the unabashed beauty of his lyric poems as he read them softly aloud, was his humility. Looking back on his career, beginning at Kenyon, one can see why. He had moved among literary giants.
Read “Pakim Pond, New Jersey” from the Summer 1954 issue of the Kenyon Review.