As a 1979 graduate of the University of the South, a/k/a Sewanee, I receive the college newsletter a few times yearly, and in the most recent issue my attention was compelled by an obiturarial notice about Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who returned as a visiting professor during my own tenure there. Had he announced the titles of his two best known books, fully described in the New York Times last November, or his pervasive themes—violence, honor, depression in the family of William Alexander Percy (Lanterns on the Levee), who inaugurated the Yale Series of Young Poets, and his cousin’s orphaned children, including Walker—I’d have signed up on the spot.
I’d always thought it was Lucas Myers, whose memoir of Plath and Hughes I’ve drawn upon for several pieces published in Plath Profiles—most recently a review of Heather Clark’s Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: The Grief of Influence, and the second installment of my “poet’s memoir,” “Bee-Stung in October.” Myers didn’t much care for Plath.
A strange distinction for which to vie, nevertheless. Why does it seem inevitable that Brown was drawn to subjects that permeate both poets’ work, while Myers became a Buddhist?
Abacus - Lines Drawn in Sand 