'His Passage Paid Home Free'

Late in 2024 I was browsing in old issues of The American Scholar from the era when Joseph Epstein was the editor. In the Winter 1986 issue I found a poem by Edward Case titled “As Grammarians”:

 

“This life which is a sentence

Is also a declaration.

We make the sense of it

In our own terms.

As grammarians

We assert our meaning,

In what we decline,

In what we affirm,

In the conjugation of love,

In the predicates

And imperatives

And ambiguities

Of prosaic choice

We essay briefly

To define ourselves

Before the stop.”

 

Why had I never heard of Case? Long before 1986, free verse had taken over like an alien species of weed and virtually snuffed out the formal natives. Case’s poem was witty – a series of near-puns playing off, Elizabethan-style, the implications of “grammar.” And yet there was nothing archaic about the language and nothing slangy. Not a syllable is out of place. No filler and nothing to excess. It left me wanting to read more by this guy. Why had I never heard of Case? Here is the tagline accompanying the poem:

   

“Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of recent work that he was preparing for publication at the time of his death last summer.”

 

I was shocked and saddened. Case had never published a collection of his poetry “Before the stop.” I found a scattering of his other poems, several as accomplished as “As Grammarians.” So I wrote about him, hoping to read more of his work and learn what had happened to this gifted unknown poet. I soon heard from James Case, the late poet’s son, a recently retired architect living in New Jersey. “He was one of the most gifted people I’ve ever known,” he wrote. We subsequently spoke many times and exchanged emails as he resolved to publish that “collection of recent work.”

 

In a resolute act of filial devotion, James has worked for the last year and a half editing, introducing, annotating, designing and publishing The Business of The Dancer (Kaseowitz Publishing, 2026).  Full disclosure: I proof-read the book several times at James’ request and tried to answer his questions when I felt competent to do so. It’s very much, however, a one-man job. In his introduction to the collection of seventy-five poems, James writes:

 

“Edward Case’s poetry is formal, often employing rhyme and meter. The poems are efficient, with no excess. While accessible, they exhibit nuanced complexity, with words often bearing multiple meanings. The tone is philosophical, with observations on life, mortality, politics, love, nature, and the nature of things. Serious but not without wit, the poems are the work of a well-read, broad intellect.”

 

Edward Case, born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, had been reviewing books since the nineteen-fifties. At the same time he was a businessman, owning a company that manufactured gasket pumps. He held ten patents. He befriended Hilton Kramer. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal and National Review and exchanged letters with the English novelist Joyce Cary. After Cary’s death in 1957, Case published an essay about his work in the Spring 1959 issue of Modern Age, in which he wrote:

 

“And then he died, and after the obituaries were written the makers of literary opinion continued to write about lesser artists, and there was no sign to indicate that anyone understood that one of the greatest creators in the history of the novel had finished his work.”

 

Case died of leukemia on July 10, 1985, at age sixty-two. Here is a brief sampler of poems from The Business of the Dancer beginning with the early “Now I Have Died a Little”:

 

“Now I have died a little.

I am a little old.

Though not for coffin ready,

Nor stone-weighed cold.

Now I have died a little,

And my dying is this:

What I cannot do, I see,

And what I shall miss.”

 

“Hasidim”:

 

“To be closer

They keep their distance.

As shadows defining light

They wear black space formally,

Like the discreet livery

Of proud servants:

Black hats, the plane width of distance

And black coats the hiding lengths

In which they stoop.

They stare inward

Like blind astronomers.

Beneath the effacing beards

Countenance is immaterial.

Hair, pious, templed,

Argues intricately

For the guarded head

Covered against the glittering, temporal,

Perilous dust.

Beauty, which is of things, is dark.

The fire which sustains the world

Hides in a spark.”

 

“Minor Poet” (reminiscent of Samuel Menashe’s work):

 

“Saved by a line

Before he sank

Into the nameless sea:

His sentence stayed,

His passage paid

Home free.”

 

And here is “1914,” one of four poems by Case published in the October 1985 issue of The New Criterion:

 

“The pearly throat of that peacock age was torn

In summer and its shriek yet grows, screaming

Unheard in all our days and deeds, like static

From a falling star, unseeming as the dust

Of space, yet crying murder as it bleeds.

So the voiceless moon imparting gravity

To frivolous tides roils the world unseen

But never hides its light nor ever slows.

 

“Slain then the nightingale and the steed,

The garden wall then fallen, the enchanted

Wood a tiring room for weary death

And summer’s lawn sown to widows’ weed.

For winter came in August killing fruit and seed.

In that broken season forever died the rose.”

 

[The Business of The Dancer is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org.]