Father of Necessity

English concentrators will tell you that one of the most attractive features of Harvard’s English department is that it boasts unmatchable scholars in addition to artists of high literary merit—or, in the case of Peter M. Sacks, both at once.

Sacks is that rare creature, a respected scholar and an accomplished poet. On Friday, April 26, at the Sackler Museum, Sacks read from his new collection, Necessity. The reading was sponsored by the Grolier Poetry Book Shop and the University as part of a series featuring Cambridge-area poets.

Sacks, originally from South Africa (a heritage that colors much of his poetry), first came to the United States as an exchange student in Detroit when he was 17. Intending to become a physician, Sacks developed his love of poetry as an undergraduate at Princeton in the early 70s, and went on to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and take a doctorate at Yale in English. He published his first collection of poems, In These Mountains, in the same year, 1986, as he published his first major scholarly endeavor, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats.

Sacks was recruited by Harvard in 1996 from Johns Hopkins by Neal Rudenstine, who, himself a scholar of English poetry, made it a special priority to fortify Harvard’s English department. It is certainly not to be taken for granted that great scholars—and great artists—make great teachers, but in Sacks’ case, his exceptionally high CUE ratings and the nearly unqualified praise he often receives from students testify to his immense pedagogical gifts.

Patrick F. Morrissey ’04, for instance—an undergraduate Literature concentrator who attended the reading—remarked that Sacks’ “attentiveness and dedication to the project of poetry—reading it and writing it—is inspiring. I’ve always been impressed by the expansiveness of his mind, his ability to incorporate seemingly divergent poetics into a broader, vital idea of poetry.”

Unlike many collections of poetry, which poets publish as soon as they have written enough to fill out a volume, many of the poems in Necessity are thematically intertwined—indeed inextricably linked to one another. The collection, Sacks explained, chronicles a journey extending, both physically and spiritually, from his South African roots to his current American home.

For instance, the first poem Sacks read, entitled “Head,” uses a poetic treatment of an African sculpture to reflect on the continent as a whole. The poem, Sacks told the audience, was written at the request of officials at Yale who solicited work from various poets on art in their Museums for the University’s tercentennial celebrtation. Another of the poems Sacks performed reflects the speaker’s experience of walking along a continental divide, exploring the scenery while expressing his emotional and intellectual response to literally being at the crossroads of two continents, as he had been spiritually for a long time.

The collection also touches on Sacks’ lifelong infatuation with water. An avid swimmer, Sacks once noted in an interview with the Harvard Gazette, “I feel the desire to immerse myself in another element which is uncontrollable, mysterious, beautiful, rhythmic, and which is related to my desire to engage with poetic language as a medium.”

It is only fitting, then, that Necessity contains a number of poems Sacks called “rivulets” (one of which he performed at the reading), and concludes with the collection’s most ambitious endeavor, a lengthy piece called “Ocean” into which all the rivers “flow,” as it were, on a thematic level.

“A book of poems,” Wallace Stevens once remarked, “is a damned serious affair.” These words are particularly apt when applied to a book of poems that, like Necessity, have a certain gestalt element and that lose something when separated from one another. To read Necessity, is to follow a coherent set of Sacks’ ruminations on a variety of subjects—to be a participant, if only fleetingly, in Sacks’ beautifully realized spiritual odyssey. By Stevens’ and, for that matter, just about any other reasonable metric, Necessity is indeed a damned serious affair—and damned good as well.