Fall Poetry with Judson Scruton: Poetry in Their Times and Ours - Poems selected from A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker 1925-2025

Please join us as Judson Scruton - live from North Carolina! - leads lively discussions exploring 100 years of poetry from The New Yorker. The newly released anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker 1925-2025 is a collection drawn from over 13,500 poems the magazine published during this time period. We will discuss poems from the decades groupings, with our October seminars looking at poems published from 1925-1950, and later seminars looking at groupings from 1950-1975, 1975-2000, and 2000-2025. As Kevin Young, the poetry editor of The New Yorker and of this anthology says in his preface: “…if people do not get the news from poems, they do find in them some comfort from the news, whether escape, investigation, or testimony, often in the same breath.”

How did we get to where we are as an American culture?  An interesting way to explore this is through examining poems in this superb anthology. Whether an Ogden Nash response shortly after the stock market crash— “A good way to forget today’s sorrows/Is by thinking hard about tomorrow's”—or  in Marianne Moore’s poem  in 1954 a month after Joseph McCarthy’s infamous senate hearings terminated, when she described Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of Saint Jerome and his lion—“The vindicated beast and/saint somehow became twinned;/and now, since they behaved and also looked alike/their lionship seems officialized”—the poems respond to their time and place.  Even the poems concerning love, landscapes, travel, art or music reflect the mood of the moment as well as lyrical, narrative, and dramatic skill. We will consider the poems in their aesthetic and historical moments, as well as how these moments are similar and different to our own.

A seminar outline and schedule will be sent out in advance of the series; please enter your email address during registration to receive the packet (and Zoom link if attending remotely). The library has ordered six copies of the anthology; look for it in the “Book Group” section. Please note: this program will be in a hybrid format meaning that we will have in-person attendees together in the Rimer Room as well as Zoom accessibility for Judson and other remote attendees.

Advance registration is required. Register online or call 203-762-6334. There is no charge for this program. This lecture series is made possible with the support of the Literary Series in Memory of Amy Quigley. By registering for the first session you will automatically be registered for all four sessions. Please email Andrea Sato with any questions at asato@wiltonlibrary.org.  

Judson Scruton M.A. (The Johns Hopkins University, The Writing Seminars, specializing in poetry) has taught creative writing and literature at prep schools and universities. In his career as an educator Judson has also directed publications, communications, public relations, and development at a variety of educational institutions in the U.S. and U.K. including the Newberry Library in Chicago.