'It Is the Past That Cast the Stars'

I and the first issue of Mad magazine arrived in October 1952. A decade or so later I was a devoted reader. That same month, Poetry, a journal I would start reading a few years after Mad, published its fortieth anniversary issue. Included is the work of more than fifty poets, virtually every major American poet alive and writing at the time, and a few from England. When I was a teenager, this lineup constituted much of my library of contemporary poets – W.H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, James Merrill, Marianne Moore, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur. Here is J.V. Cunningham’s “Horoscope”: 

“Out of my birth

The magi chart my worth;

They mark the influence

 Of hour and day; they weigh what thence

 

“Must come to me.

I in their cold sky see

            No Venus and no Mars:

 It is the past that cast the stars

 

“That guide me now.

 In winter, when the bough

 Has lost its leaves, the storm

That piled them deep will keep them warm.”

 

It’s still fashionable to malign the nineteen-fifties as a cultural desert, a sterile decade in American literature. In 1952, Ralph Ellison, Whitaker Chambers and Flannery O’Connor published Invisible Man, Witness and Wise Blood, respectively, and Nabokov would soon complete Lolita.