Henry Taylor, an award-winning poet about rural life, dies at the age of 82

Although Taylor moved west in retirement and lived outside Seattle and settled in Santa Fe a decade ago, his work has remained rooted in the hunting grounds landscape of his youth. He filled his verses with horses, deer, tractors and silos; published a book of poems, “Crooked Run” (2006), the main theme of which was the stream near his family home in Loudoun County; and used rural life as the setting for a vivid but unsentimental exploration of loss and freedom, life and death.

“The things that have happened on this earth I have known longer than other things. And the deepest things, when they come to the surface, awaken the strongest urge to write,” he told The Washington Post in 1986, recalling his rural hometown after winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his third collection, “The Flying Change.” “

The book’s title comes from an equestrian term referring to the air adjustments a horse can make while galloping. As Mr. Taylor wrote in the title poem, which begins with a piece of prose: “The purpose of teaching a horse to move under you is to remind him how he moved when he was free.” The poem becomes a meditation on the passage of time:

Sometimes when I take water in my hand

and watch it recede and disappear,

I see that age will turn my hands into a sieve;

but for a moment the changing world stops

its flight and leans towards the sun again,

as if to interrupt his mindless immersion

through works and days that will no longer come.

I hold still in the bright air

maintained in time astride the flying shift.

Other poems in the collection dealt with love and family, and how violence can suddenly invade the mundane. In “Barbed Wire,” a horse drops dead after inexplicably running past a barbed wire fence that “jingled like a bowstring in the shattered air.” In “Landscape with a Tractor”, a woman’s body is discovered while mowing a field: “She was someone / and now she is nothing, buried, burned / or dissected; but he disappeared.

Reviewing “The Flying Change” in the New York Times, author Peter Stitt wrote that “Mr. Taylor seeks out this kind of unsettling change in her poetry, the kind of tear in the veil of ordinary life that she expresses in “Heartburn,” where she realizes that “you can still take a wrong step/on uneven ground, in the dark” and not/completely mutilate yourself. ‘”

Mr. Taylor also had a wry, even silly sense of humor, which was evident in his fondness for clerihews, whimsical four-line poems that serve as miniature biographies or epitaphs. The structure of the poem is extremely limited – each clerihew consists of two rhyming couplets, and the first line must end with the subject’s name – forcing the writer to come up with surprising and unexpected juxtapositions, as Mr. Taylor did in poems about Supreme Court justices, Peter the Apostle and book critics on and off The Post:

Jonathan Yardley

reads quietly, but writes almost,

crossing the limits of his dominion

on purely illustrative issues.

The oldest of four children, Henry Splawn Taylor was born on June 21, 1942, in Lincoln, Virginia, just outside Leesburg. His family had lived in the area since about 1780, although his mother, Mary Splawn Taylor, was a newcomer from Texas. : A teacher who helped promote racial integration in county schools and libraries. She was the daughter of a former chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission and president of the University of Texas.

Mr. Taylor grew up learning to ride horses and reading poems by his father, Thomas, a farmer who became a teacher. “Over the years, I have cared for horses more than anything else; then I grew up. But I still care about horses,” he told The Post.

Raised in the Religious Society of Friends, he graduated from the George School, a Quaker boarding and day school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and studied English at the University of Virginia.

By his own admission, he was an indifferent student, skipping classes when he was bored, and leaving classes some time before graduating in 1965. He received significant encouragement from one of his professors, the poet George Garrett, who advised him that “if you can, “don’t make any money” writing poetry, “you might as well have fun.”

Mr. Taylor quickly gained a reputation as a parodist, making fun of established writers in lines such as “J. V. Cunningham hangs up on a dirty, all-around, joke” and “James Wright is distressed by the death of the horse he bought from Robert Bly.” Both pieces appeared in his first book, The Horse Show at Midnight (1966), which was published a few weeks before he received his MFA in creative writing from Hollins College (now University) in Virginia.

After teaching at Roanoke College and the University of Utah, he joined the faculty at American University in 1971. Taylor returned to Lincoln and commuted to Washington, D.C. for poetry classes and events, including open mic nights where he performed in elegant sports coat and bow tie, discussing craft and technique with established poets, emerging writers, and anyone else interested in poetry.

“Henry was open to talking to all these people, and to me that’s something that’s at risk right now,” said poet Sandra Beasley, one of his former UA students. “People who are poets and have a secure position in academia are not always fully integrated into the larger city around them. And Henry did a great job modeling it.”

Mr. Taylor also taught poetry workshops in elementary schools (“I like walking into a room full of third-graders who don’t know who I am,” he explained), reviewed books for the Washington Times and translated works from Bulgarian, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian and Russian, including a verse version of Sophocles’ “Electra” for the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Many of his essays on contemporary poetry were collected in the book “Obligatory Numbers”, published in 1992. His other works include the poetry collections “Understanding Fiction” (1996), in which he used writing as a metaphor for life; “Short Candles: 101 Clerihews” (2000); and “In this tilted world I live. New and selected poems” (2020).

Mr. Taylor was married and divorced twice to Sarah Spencer, whom he met in college and with whom he reconnected at a poetry reading near her home in Maine. Meanwhile, he was married for over 25 years to Frances “Frannie” Carney, an accountant, with whom he had two sons. Their marriage ended in divorce.

In 2002, he married Mooshe (also known as Marsha) Nickel, a textile artist who says she met Mr. Taylor in her 60s while taking classes with him at the University of California. After Mr. Taylor retired in 2003, they traveled the country in an RV for several years and then bought a house in Gig Harbor, Washington, when their RV broke down. They later moved to Santa Fe, where Mr. Taylor lived what he called “a fairly restrained, secluded life.”

“He was a formalist in every way – in his poetry, in his presentation,” said poet and radio host Grace Cavalieri, who knew Taylor for three decades. “But there was always something inside him that wanted to be released. And finally he actually did it.”

Surviving in addition to his wife are his sons, Thomas and Richard; two sisters; and two grandchildren. Frannie, the mother of his children, died four days after him.

When reflecting on the art of poetry, Taylor sometimes used equestrian metaphors, drawing comparisons between the wordless communication between horse and rider and the elusive bond between a poem and its reader.

“There’s poetry there sometimes,” he told the Roanoke Review in 2021. “It’s in the words you couldn’t say or write down, but somehow you have to suggest it in the words that are there.”