Selected Poems

These are the poems of a young American poet who understood that constraint breeds invention. Written during the heady years of Harvard in the mid-1880s, Sanborn's work cycles through the sonnet's tight fourteen lines, the looping repetitions of the rondel, and the obsessive circularity of the villanelle, forms he wielded with evident pleasure rather than reverent solemnity. Yet what elevates these pages is not mere technical exercise: threaded through the collection is a comic sensibility, a willingness to mock the very traditions he's mastering. Here is a poet who takes poetry seriously enough to joke about it, who experiments not in a scholarly void but in the energetic, slightly anarchic atmosphere of Harvard's literary magazines. The result is verse that feels alive, even now, urbanely ironic in one stanza, genuinely moving in the next. For readers curious about the rich, under-explored terrain of late nineteenth-century American poetry, or for anyone who delights in seeing a nimble mind play with form, these poems offer genuine rewards.