James Campbell
T he first inkling of William Styron’s interest in the rebel slave leader Nat Turner, which evolved into the prolix, vision-packed novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), surfaces in a letter to his literary agent in 1952. Styron asked Elizabeth McKee to look out for a copy of The Southampton Insurrection by William S. Drewry (1900). “It’s the only full account I know of the Nat Turner rebellion, and I’d like to read it.” “Gee I’m afraid I wont be good for anything after this war!”, Ernest Hemingway wrote to his parents in September 1918. He was recuperating at an Alpine hotel on Lake Maggiore, having been granted leave from the military hospital where he was undergoing “electrical treatments” on his severely wounded legs. “All I know now is war”, the nineteen-year-old continued. “Everything else seems like a dream.” Toward the end of James Schuyler’s sixty-page, long-lined meditation “The Morning of the Poem,” a voice interrupts the meandering interior monologue: “‘All he cares about are leaves and / flowers and weather.’” The remark is unattributed, but the speaker might be the poet’s mother or sister, both of whom step in and out of the poem. Regardless, he or she is different from the “you” addressed next, without even a sentence break: