Happy birthday to poet Edgar Bowers! He thought “intelligence and sympathy” would save the world.
Thursday, March 2nd, 2017
Los Angeles poet Timothy Steele has another birthday post (see earlier ones here and here and here). This time the Stanford alum is appreciating another Stanford alum, the under-recognized Edgar Bowers:
Born in Rome, Georgia, on March 2, 1924, Edgar Bowers served in Europe in the Second World War with the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps. After Germany surrendered to the Allies, he was posted to Hitler’s alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden, where he headed a unit of the “De-nazification” program, whose goal was to identify individuals and groups responsible for atrocities committed during the Third Reich.
In his later years, Bowers came to believe that the survival of the species depended on its intelligence and sympathy, though he recognized that human knowledge is inevitably limited and that science and peace will probably never entirely overcome the forces of ignorance and war. He published five books of poetry, including a Collected Poems in 1997.
Bowers died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in San Francisco in 2000.
One of Bowers’s best-known poems is “The Astronomers of Mont Blanc,” which he reads in the video below. The poem and the recording (taken the early 1950s, when he was a graduate student at Stanford University) are reproduced with the kind permission of The Literary State of Edgar Bowers and its Executor, Joshua S. Odell.
Happy birthday, Edgar!
The Astronomers of Mont Blanc
Who are you there that, from your icy tower,
Explore the colder distances, the far
Escape of your whole universe to night;
That watch the moon’s blue craters, shadowy crust,
And blunted mountains mildly drift and glare,
Ballooned in ghostly earnest on your sight:
Who are you, and what hope persuades your trust?
It is your hope that you will know the end
And compass of our ignorant restraint
There in lost time, where what was done is done
Forever as a havoc overhead.
Aging, you search to master in the faint
Persistent fortune which you gaze upon
The perfect order trusted to the dead.
– Edgar Bowers (1924-2000)
