Malcolm Cowley

Malcolm Cowley Poems

Malcolm Cowley Biography

Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist. Early life Born August 28, 1898 in Western Pennsylvania, Cowley grew up in Pittsburgh, where his father William was a homeopathic doctor. He graduated from Peabody High School where his friend Kenneth Burke was also a student. in 1920 he earned a B.A. from Harvard University. Education He interrupted his undergraduate studies to join the American Field Service in France during World War I. From the Western Front he reported on the war for The Pittsburgh Gazette (today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Marriage and family Upon returning to the USA, Cowley married artist Peggy Baird; they were divorced in 1931. His second wife was Muriel Maurer. Together they had one son, Robert William Cowley, who is an editor and military historian.)

The Best Poem Of Malcolm Cowley

Blue Juniata

Farmhouses curl like horns of plenty, hide
scrawny bare shanks against a barn, or crouch
empty in the shadow of a mountain. Here
there is no house at all—

only the bones of a house,
lilacs growing beside them,
roses in clumps between them,
honeysuckle over;
a gap for a door, a chimney
mud-chinked, an immense fireplace,
the skeleton of a pine,

and gandy dancers working on the rails
that run not thirty yards from the once door.

I heard a gandy dancer playing on a jew's harp
Where is now that merry party I remember long ago?
Nelly was a lady ... twice ... Old Black Joe,
as if he laid his right hand on my shoulder,
saying, "Your father lived here long ago,
your father's father built the house, lies buried
under the pine—"
Sing Nelly was a lady
... Blue Juniata ... Old Black Joe:

for sometimes a familiar music hammers
like blood against the eardrums, paints a mist
across the eyes, as if the smells of lilacs,
moss roses, and the past became a music
made visible, a monument of air.

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