![]() The essays, always written in the first person and always emotionally charged (even when they carried a payload of scientific argument) are often best read as prose poems. Auden, Conrad Aiken and Archibald McNiece, but it can be at least argued that the greater part of Eiseley’s poetic imagination went into his prose. His poetry was appreciated and encouraged by some great poets, including W.H. ![]() And from far up, ringing from peak to peak of the summits over us, came a cry of such unutterable and ecstatic joy that it sounds down across the years and tingles among the cups on my quiet breakfast table.”Įiseley’s first published works were poems and he returned to writing verse at the very end of his career. Straight out of the sun’s eye, where she must have been soaring restlessly above us for untold hours, hurtled his mate. It was not the cry of the hawk I had captured for, by shifting my position against the sun, I was now seeing further up. An ability to raise a chuckle over the death of Little Nell is famously supposed to be the touchstone of literary tough-mindedness nowadays, but even the flintiest of modern ironists might be unable to suppress a tiny lump in the throat at this description of the release of a captured hawk from Eiseley’s ‘The Bird and the Machine’: “I was young then and had seen little of the world, but when I heard that cry my heart turned over. Eiseley tackled the deepest of subject matter, human nature and destiny viewed from the perspective of Darwinian evolution, and he tackled it in finely-honed and emotional prose. The source of that popularity will perhaps become understandable once you read some of the essays in this anthology. When men landed on the moon in July 1969, Eiseley was the first author commissioned to write a book placing this event in philosophical perspective, while in the same year he received the highest accolade American popular culture could then bestow, an article published in Playboy. His first essay collection ‘The Immense Journey’, published in 1957, sold 500,000 copies over the next decade. In 1968 Professor Loren Corey Eiseley was rated among the most admired nature writers in the USA, and his dramatically personal essays on archaeology, fossil hunting, evolution, human origins and animal behaviour were devoured by fascinated lay readers in highbrow magazines from The American Scholar to Scientific American and Harper’s. The anthology never appeared, due to apparently insuperable copyright issues, and I present my introduction here as a smaller attempt to resurrect Eiseley’s reputation, a project that could hardly be more topical… I originally wrote this essay in 2005 as the introduction to an anthology of Loren Eiseley’s works whose publication was to be sponsored by my late business partner Felix Dennis.
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