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Remembrance of Things to Come
Edward Pols
A slim, valedictory book of poems by Edward Pols, a distinguished philosopher who completed it in the final weeks of his life. Moving between Maine, Italy, and the Europe of the Second World War, the poems circle love and loss, mortality, and the memories of a war Pols lived through—most fully in a sequence titled 'War's End, World's End,' parts of which appeared earlier in the *Sewanee Review* and the *Massachusetts Review*. A career spent thinking rigorously about mind and agency gives the verse an unusual clarity and gravity. Franklin Burroughs's introduction places the work in modern literature and pays tribute to the man. Quiet and unshowy, it's the kind of late book that gathers a life into a few pages. For readers drawn to poetry of memory, war, and reckoning, it rewards a slow, attentive reading.
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The author
Edward Pols (1919–2005) was Kenan Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Bowdoin College, author of philosophical works including On Rational Agency. A veteran of the Second World War, he turned late in life to poetry, completing this volume within weeks of his death.
The book
Remembrance of Things to Come, issued under a Bowdoin College imprint in 2005, is a compact collection rooted in Maine, Italy, and wartime Europe. Its centerpiece is the sequence 'War's End, World's End,' and the book carries an introduction by the essayist Franklin Burroughs.
How it reads
The poems are restrained and reflective, shaped by a philosopher's precision and a survivor's memory. This is not virtuoso verse but the considered late work of a serious mind, and it holds a particular poignancy given the circumstances of its completion.
For more context
Pols belongs to the generation of American writers and thinkers whose imaginations were permanently marked by the Second World War, and the book reads as both memoir and elegy.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Edward Pols
- Publisher
- Bowdoin College
- Year
- 2005
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Maine