JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN
(l916- 1998)

academic yet
  in a free lease
 of nature
you taught my uncle
and I well
Eliot , Larkin, Auden
became higher than flesh
than merely modern
played by a lyre
their weight above
     a human search
  for the spiritual awe
  and desire to love
sought by the physical
with a metaphysical conceit
         leading our English
classroom into grace
of a Spenser and Milton
as a young tutor
 with a new trace
in his thesis and dissertation
wishing for an Odysseus
 to discover Bloom
  from his metamorphosis
  who became a Beat