John Updike, the Poet

When John Updike died in January, it was an enormous blow to the fiction world.  As his newest work, a posthumous collection of poems called “Endpoint: And Other Poems” demonstrates, it was an enormous blow to the poetry world as well. Although Updike was known primarily as novelist, he was endowed with considerable talents that he–as well as his contemporaries–were careful to label “poetic.”  They shouldn’t have been, says Clive James in The New York Times.

Of course, it’s not much of a leap to imagine Updike the poet as an antecedent to Updike the fiction writer. His gift for lyricism and imagery, hallmarks of the poetic craft, were always among the most striking aspects of his fiction. With his powers of wordplay, even his treatment of quotidian subjects such as divorce was rendered sublime.

James reveals that Updike always viewed writing poetry as a holiday from writing fiction, but “his very last book, a book of poems, proves that he always had what it took.” The contents of “Endpoint” are largely focused on mortality, a theme shown to be present in many of Updike’s earlier poems as well as the ones that, dating back to 2002, comprise the titular section of the collection. James writes, “the way these poems search their author’s early mind suggests he has belatedly discovered a modus operandi that he might have used all along.”