It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Frederick Morgan, a longstanding friend of and contributor to The New Criterion. He will be well known to our readers: his poems appeared often in our pages, though not as often as we might have liked.
Fred Morgan managed to have three distinguished literary careers. The first was as an editor and (using the term in the highest sense) literary impresario, someone who brings literary talent to the attention of the public. In 1948, shortly after having been graduated from Princeton, Fred started The Hudson Review with his college friends Joseph Bennett and William Arrowsmith, the well-known classicist and translator. The moment had found its men. The world was bursting with literary talent and The Hudson Review—that is, Fred Morgan and his colleagues—had the wit to discern and the charm to attract some of the best. The roster of contributors to the quarterly in its early years reads like a literary Who’s Who of the period: not just T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and Robert Graves, but also Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, and Theodore Roethke. Eudora Welty and Sylvia Plath published in The Hudson Review, and so did Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, and R. P. Blackmur. It was an extraordinary editorial performance, not so much eclectic (which implies a certain lack of direction) as wide-ranging, non-ideological, focused above all on literary interest and intellectual distinction.
In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Fred also published some excellent literary criticism himself, carving out a quiet but distinguished niche as a literary critic of exacting standards and penetrating observation. By the mid-1960s, Bennett and Arrowsmith had left The Hudson Review. Fred carried on and was joined by Paula Deitz, his collaborator, later his wife and co-editor, who has been editor-in-chief of The Hudson Review since Fred’s retirement a few years ago.
Fred did not publish much of his own poetry before the age of fifty, but once he started he made up for lost time. From the early 1970s until his death in February, he published some ten volumes. His Poems: New and Selected, published in 1987, solidified his reputation as one of the most accomplished American poets of his generation. Fred’s language tended to be spare, his manner decorous, his matter oscillating between a kind of commemorative eroticism and a certain species of generous though cheerfully disabused meditation. He was a man of deep feeling but equally deep reserve. The result was a poetry of lapidary understatement and keen, immaculately modulated emotion.
Fred wrote many sorts of poems: love poems, celebrations of nature, elegies for the death of loved ones. Among our favorites are what might be described as existential observations: dry, quiet, deep in their confident simplicity. One such poem, read aloud at Fred’s funeral, is “The Step”:
From where you are at any moment you
may step off into death.
Is it not a clinching thought?
I do not mean a stoical bravado
of making the great decision blade in hand
but the awareness, all so simple, that
right in the middle of the day
you may be called to an adjoining room.
A clinching thought, indeed: hardly novel, but how regularly neglected. It was part of Fred’s genius to remind us tactfully of what we meant to remember but were too lazy or too distracted to heed. Farewell, Fred. We shall miss you.
