The task and potential greatness of mortals,” in the words of Hannah Arendt as quoted by Donald Hall at the beginning of his eleventh book of poems, The Museum of Clear Ideas, “reside in their ability to produce things which are at home in everlastingness.” Hall’s strategy for being “at home in everlastingness” organizes itself around three emphases: a seven-page elegy for a fictitious poet of our time named Bill Trout; a long, nine-part poem called “Baseball,” the sections of which are innings, written in nine-syllable lines; and the long title sequence, an omnium gatherum modeled after Horace’s odes. There is in addition a reprise of “Baseball” called “Extra Innings.”
Being a particularly trusting reader, the first time I read “Another Elegy” I missed Hall’s broad hint, delivered in the form of an epigraph from T. S. Eliot: “Both one and many; in the brown baked features/ The eyes of a familiar compound ghost . . .” But I’m glad I was credulous enough to read the poem at least once under the impression that Bill Trout was a real person—or at least wondering which real-life poet Hall had in mind when he was imagining the character.
Donald Hall is our finest elegist.
My credulity was not badly misplaced, because in Bill Trout, Hall has sketched a composite picture of his generation of poets. In the pastiche of a biographical sketch from “The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Verse” that Hall has appended in his notes to
