Respondents included the poet Allen Tate, a Catholic convert, who took a pessimistic yet realistic view. The June 1955 issue included a symposium titled “Does American Catholic Education Produce Its Share of Leaders in the Literary Field?” The symposium operated from the position that there was a “dearth of top-rank Catholic literary leaders from Catholic colleges and universities.” The magazine then solicited reactions for future issues from “authors, teachers, and literary critics in response to a pointed question: why don’t “Catholic colleges and universities in the United States produce an adequate supply of Catholic writers?” “When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.” He wrote critical essays, book reviews, and politically minded poems. In fact, Adams’s stated goal was “to excite a taste for poetry.” He translated Juvenal for the magazine. Like other contributors, his work was unsigned, but reveals a lifelong devotion to poetry. Critics were not kind to his own, posthumously published volumes of poetry.Īdams had regularly published in Port Folio, a Philadelphia-based journal of politics and literature, from 1801 to 1812. He hoped that, inevitably, “when I come to be ashamed of the poetry, I may still adhere to the morality.” In 1839, he later wrote of his occasional verse: “I sicken at the sight of them.” His worries were prophetic. On the morning of March 20, 1827, he drafted a sonnet about thoughts of loyalty. His ideas were not satisfactory, and Adams lamented: “It is with poetry as with chess and billiards: there is a certain degree of attainment which labor and practice will reach, and beyond which no vigils and no vows will go.”Īdams longed to be a great poet, but often doubted the worth of his verse. In a diary entry from March 31, 1829, a few weeks after his presidential term ended, John Quincy Adams described how he mused “upon the construction of half a dozen elegiac stanzas” while riding his horse that afternoon.

Books mentioned in the paris library