02/27/2000

By Tom Mayo

POETRY

February - a short month, even in the longest years, but there are those who love it.

Indeed, it's the month of love itself when all the world loves a lover. It probably wouldn't be so but for Feb. 14, which John Donne celebrated with these lines: "Hail, Bishop Valentine, whose day this is/ All the air is thy Diocese."

February is also the month of Sylvia Plath's 1963 death, three days before Valentine's Day. Her story is almost mythic in its excesses, much like her poetry, which can be painfully confessional in style and content.

As readers of, say, The Collected Poems, edited by her husband, English poet Ted Hughes, and published in 1981, we can't ever quite forget what we know of their relationship. This may be because of how her story ends - Mr. Hughes leaves Ms. Plath for another woman after the birth of their second child, Ms. Plath kills herself - and inevitably, we read the tragedy of her life back into her poems.

Somehow it does not seem surprising that Mr. Hughes survived (many have never forgiven him for this). His poetry is drenched with human and natural violence, which (at least for the survivor, whom he celebrates) is transformative and even somewhat redemptive, but at the end of it all, it is the survivor who commands center stage.

Loving couples and working poets

Quite apart from their obsessions, the many madnesses both great and small, poets experience the world differently from the rest of us, and one can only imagine the home lives of couples who are also poets. Queen Elizabeth I, little of whose poetry has survived, and Sir Walter Raleigh were a poetic couple who shared a residence (some speculate, more) at least during the years that Raleigh served as captain of the queen's guard, although courtly love in 16th-century England may have fallen outside the boundaries of Bishop Valentine's diocese.

Among other poet-couples down through the ages, none is better to remember in February than another Elizabeth - Elizabeth Barrett - and Robert Browning, who escaped her ultra-Victorian father by marrying in secret and fleeing to Italy, where the consumptive Elizabeth died 15 years later in her husband's arms. Of the two, I much prefer the poetry of Elizabeth, whose writing life overlapped early modernists such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and whose poems (even her sonnets) seem less mannered and more grounded than her husband's.

There may be no connection, but within two years of the publication of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Elizabeth was producing unrhymed pentameter with the feel of free verse and in language that is almost conversational: "Nay, if there's room for poets in this world/ A little overgrown (I think there is),/ Their sole work is to represent the age,/ Their age, not Charlemagne's - this live, throbbing age,/ That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires . . . "

It's a short leap from this to Marianne Moore's "Poetry," in which the reader "discovers in/ it, after all, a place for the genuine."

Living the poetic life together

The list of 20th-century poet-couples is a long one, but two are especially worth mentioning. Donald Hall married Jane Kenyon in 1972; three years later he resigned his professorship and they left Ann Arbor for his family's New Hampshire farm. Between the two poets - vastly different in voice and style - there is some evidence in their poems of a shared life. But none of these is as revealing and ultimately shattering as their poems about Ms. Kenyon's losing battle with leukemia. In his collection Without (Houghton Mifflin, $22) and her last volume of new and selected poems, Otherwise (Graywolf Press, $16 paperback), the husband and wife chronicle the uneven progress of her disease and their reactions to it. Mr. Hall's journey from childhood and now toward a life without Ms. Kenyon is traced in The Old Life (Mariner Books, $13 paperback), a great read and a rewarding postscript to the subject of Otherwise.

A last poet-couple to consider, also New Englanders by choice: Mary Jo Salter, an Emily Dickinson Lecturer in Humanities at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., and her husband, poet and critic Brad Leithauser. Her most recent collection, A Kiss in Space (Knopf, $22), is hard to pigeonhole but easy to love. She is just as compelling when she takes us on an unforgettable balloon ride over the cathedral at Chartres as when she explores unlikely linguistic connections that link Sherlock Holmes, Alexander Graham Bell and Helen Keller. Mr. Leithauser's The Odd Last Thing She Did (Knopf, $22), by comparison, lacks the sheer exhilaration of invention and of play in Ms. Salter's poems, but he does a nice job with a noirish mystery in the title poem, his fine technical skills are always on display and here, too, is a place for the genuine.

Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature and Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.