VIOLENT contrasts racked his life and art. His poems could be golden and struck by grace, split by the metaphysical hammer of God; but his most golden lines were yoked to an ironic, satanic vision of the meanness of a scrap-iron age. He captured, and still captures, the minds of the young; but he personified himself as "an old man in a dry month," and his characteristic poetic voice was that of a man who seemed at least 50 the day he was born.
He was born a prairie-state American; he made himself the apotheosis...
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