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( In this study, first published in 1951, the author exam...)
In this study, first published in 1951, the author examines the poetry of Yeats’s last years, that poetry which reached and held to the ‘intensity’ which he had striven for all his life. Vivienne Koch explores the ways in which the great but troubled poems derive their energy from suffering, and examines thirteen of his last poems in detail, each with a slightly different focus. This title will be of interest to students of literature.
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Vivienne Koch was born in 1911 in New York City, New York, United States. She was the daughter of John Desider Koch, a manufacturing jeweler, and of Helen Karman. Both her parents were Hungarian immigrants--her father from an urban, intellectual background, her mother from a rural background. As a child Koch learned Hungarian from her grandparents and German from her nurse.
Koch attended New York City public schools, showing special ability in dramatics, debating, and writing. In 1928, Koch enrolled at New York University's Washington Square College, majoring in drama. But what she later called "the shabby intellectual content of courses in the theatre" turned her away from drama to literature and philosophy. After receiving the Bachelor of Arts in 1932, she earned an Master of Arts in comparative literature at Columbia University (1933). Her thesis explored Anton Chekhov's influence on James Joyce. Koch then made substantial progress toward a Doctor of Philosophy (which she never completed) at Columbia (1933 - 1934), at the University of Maryland (1943 - 1944), and again at Columbia (1945 - 1947).
In the mid 1930's the need for a job diverted her from literature to social work in Harlem. "My innocence was a blessing and I sailed blithely into marijuana dens, brothels, and dingy-hall bedrooms, " she later recalled. Although the experience was generally a profitable one, at the end of three years her initial innocence had been tempered by a street-wise realism.
In 1938 she began her teaching career as a speech instructor at Mount Holyoke College at South Hadley, Massachussets.
In 1939 she returned to social work, only to leave it after two years, when "the [philosophical] inadequacies of case work and the undemocratic political pressures of my professional setting conflicted too monstrously with my human and intellectual values. "
Koch began to write literary criticism about 1944, while a teaching assistant at the University of Maryland. From 1945 to 1948 she was an instructor at Columbia University.
In 1947 she began a ten-year association with New York University's Division of General Studies and the Washington Square College English department; she taught courses on Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and other twentieth-century writers.
In the summer of 1950, Koch was a lecturer at the Breadloaf School of English in Middlebury, Vermont, and during the winter of 1954 she was a visiting professor at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. During this period she was also a guest lecturer at Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, Yale, and other universities.
After her divorce from Macleod in 1946, Koch went to England and France for six months to do research on a Juliette Fisher Andrews fellowship. A Rockefeller fellowship supported another year (1949 - 1950) in England, France, and Italy. During her time abroad, she developed friendships with such British literary figures as T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, and Herbert Read. At home she knew Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams.
The period 1944-1954 was a prolific one for Koch as a critic. Besides publishing extensively in scholarly journals, she wrote William Carlos Williams (1950) and W. B. Yeats: The Tragic Phase (1951).
Her stay in Austria teaching American literature at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies prompted her to shift from criticism to fiction. The result was Change of Love (1960), an intricate, urban novel of character and intrigue based on her experiences at Salzburg.
Koch founded, and for a time was president of, New York University's Poetry Center, where American and British poets and critics gave readings and lectures. Writing under the influence of New Criticism, which with its sophisticated practice and complicated theory drew distinct lines between the poem and the poet, she found and explicated the points where the lines crossed, lucidly illuminating both poet and poem.
( In this study, first published in 1951, the author exam...)
In 1935, Koch married the poet Norman Macleod. In 1955 Koch married John F. Day, vice-president of news at CBS. The marriage provided her with domestic and financial security. She had no children with either of her husbands.
