front cover of The Second Man and Other Poems
The Second Man and Other Poems
Louis Coxe
University of Minnesota Press, 1955
The Second Man and Other Poems was first published in 1955.The forty poems which make up this second volume of Mr. Coxe’s poetry display an impressive range of subject and technique. He writes of love and religion, of men at sea, of historical moments of violence decision, and of the face of nature. But the predominant themes are those which Mr. Coxe treats with especial authority: the living meaning of his native New England, of its past, and of the people who make it.Mr. Coxe writes many kinds of poetry. There are lyrics, songs, reflective poems, and dramatic monologues. Although he experiments with meter and explores the riches of language, his poetry is traditional in the best sense.Among the poems in this volume are some that have been published previously in such magazines as The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Western Review, Furioso, Hudson Review, Poetry, and Paris Review.
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front cover of The Wilderness and Other Poems
The Wilderness and Other Poems
Louis Coxe
University of Minnesota Press, 1958
The Wilderness and Other Poems was first published in 1958.This collection, Mr. Coxe’s third published volume of poetry, includes the long narrative poem “The Wilderness” and thirty-four shorter lyric poems. Of this book, Morton Dauwen Zabel writes: “The Wilderness is a collection of series and thoughtful poems, scrupulously conceived and phrased, many of them notable for personal charm and feeling as well, and for combining a keenly responsible intelligence with genuine lyric and reflective emotion.”Each of the poems dramatizes a single experience or complex of feelings about certain fairly common experiences. In many of the poems there is a prevailing theme of the tension between the opposite poles of will and fate. A few of the more ambitious poems attempt to answer the question, How is a man to live today?Since Mr. Coxe believes that a poem should sound well, these are poems for the ear as well as for the eye.The long title poem is published here for the first time. Some of the shorter poems have appeared in such magazines as the New Yorker, the Nation, the New Republic, Poetry, and the Sewanee Review.Earlier volumes of Mr. Coxe’s poetry are The Second Man and Other Poems (University of Minnesota Press) and The Sea Faring and Other Poems. He is also the co-author, with Robert Chapman, of Billy Budd: A Play.
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