Poets, Poetry and Patronage: focusing on Harvard’s ‘Patron of Poetry’—the Brooklyn-born millionaire, John L ‘Jack’ Sweeney (1906-1986) who ‘worked for free’ in the Woodberry Poetry Room (HU). He was a pioneer in the recording of poets reading their poems. He ameliorated Harvard’s fractious dealings with poets—in William James’ term ‘undisciplinables’—and pursued a precipitous diplomatic role on campus. Suspicious of the hermeneutics and theories within the academy, he supported American genius from modernism onwards to the 1980s including Berryman, Creeley, Cummings, Eliot, Lowell, Olson, Plath, Pound, Rich, Stevens, and ‘the sturdy beggar’ Dylan Thomas.
Jack Sweeney reached out to a constellation of 20th century poets, not merely schools and movements but also mavericks and outsiders in conflict with professors and curricula, real poetry versus academic poetry; and he eventually quit the groves of academe for patronage outside of Harvard’s walls.
The non-academic Introduction and A-Z present a subversive scholarly, holographic, critical, biographical history of poetry based on unpublished letters and vast resources, unravelling the poetics, the politics, triumphs and tragedies. Poets in breakdown and breakthrough, madness and suicide, agony, ecstasy, and comedy; and producing immortal poetry and literature which is free patronage to the university system.
‘Jack Sweeney, waiting, gracious, whitehaired, loveable, in the quiet sanctum of the poetry room.’—Sylvia Plath
‘Jack Sweeney, he introJUICED Dylan [Thomas] to Harvard.’—Ezra Pound
‘You do know, don’t you, Jack, that I appreciate all you have done for me and think of you always with great fondness.’—Anne Sexton
‘Benevolent Jack Sweeney!’—Marianne Moore
‘Dear Jack, Thank you for your Phi Beta Kappa poem (“An Arch for Janus”). I liked the poem. I found it moving, especially, for some reason, the reference to John Quincy Adams.’—T. S. Eliot
‘My staunch friend Jack Sweeney (himself a poet) who runs the Harvard ‘record room’”—E. E. Cummings
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