Companion Piece

Daniel G. Hoffman honors his poet wife by publishing her early work.

by J.F. Pirro

poetry/exhibit

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At an art-house movie theater in New York in 1946, poet Daniel G. Hoffman met a woman who happened to be a poetry editor. He married her, and for 57 years they were inseparable. When Elizabeth McFarland died in 2005, her husband — the Felix Schelling professor of English emeritus at UPenn — uncovered 70 of her poems in their Swarthmore attic and compiled some into the first book of her poems ever published, Over the Summer Water (Orchises Press, $14.95), to which Hoffman wrote the preface, a sort of literary eulogy. This book is the centerpiece of Swarthmore College's monthlong exhibit about McFarland's life and career, running through April 4.

McFarland, poetry editor of Ladies' Home Journal in Philadelphia from 1948 to 1961, published greats (Marianne Moore, Theodore Roethke) and those groping for breaks (Sylvia Plath, John Updike). She's also the woman responsible for raising the LHJ's poetry fee from $1 to $10 a line. "Dick Eberhart once joked that his 46-line poem paid one summer's rent in Maine," Hoffman says.

Over the Summer ranges from elegiac ("Lost Girl") to alliterative and lyrical ("A Little Liking"); there's also a suite of love poems. Beneath a bashful facade, McFarland's work was brawny in its linguistic mastery.

When Hoffman first met McFarland , they immediately found a common interest — the four poetry anthologies of Oscar Williams. (Hoffman owned the two McFarland didn't, and vice versa.) By spring 1947, he escorted her — "in trench coat, trousers and her hair done up in a beret," Hoffman says — into the all-male Boar's Head Poetry Society at Columbia to hear W.H. Auden read.

Seven years later, Auden chose Hoffman's first collection, An Armada of Thirty Whales (1954), for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Hoffman went on to become chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Until 1999, he was also poet in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. He has written, edited or translated 23 books of poetry and literary criticism.

Hoffman placed half of his findings in Over the Summer Water; the rest will comprise a second volume. He doesn't know, though, how his "private, modest" wife would have reacted to his publishing the first batch.

"After her job [at Ladies Home Journal] ended, she became disenchanted with poetry and didn't talk about it," he says. "At least for those who knew her virtues, wit, tenderness and lyrical impulses, they can remember her again. For others, she's been introduced."

(j_pirro@citypaper.net)

ELIZABETH MCFARLAND Through April 4, free, McCabe Library, Swarthmore College, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore, 610-328-8477, swarthmore.edu