Midpoint and Other Poems

By John Updike

In the boldly eclectic title poem of his collection, John Updike employs the meters of Dante, Spenser, Pope, Whitman, and Pound, as well as the pictographic tactics of concrete poetry, to take an inventory of his life at the end of his thirty-fifth year—at midpoint. 

These cantos form both a joke on the antique genre of the long poem and an attempt to write one: an earnest meditation on the mysteries of the ego, lost time, and the mundane.

The remainder of the volume is a six years’ harvest of light verse and incidental lyrics—poems dealing with love and death, animals and angels, places and persons, dream artifacts and the naked ape.  As a writer of humorous verse Mr. Updike is alone in his generation; to serious poetry he brings the vision and warmth characteristic of his prose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307961921

John Updike

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

Reviews for Midpoint and Other Poems

[jensenmk82 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In many ways this is Updike's most ambitious volume of poetry, but many of the poems reflect his allegiance to the minor genre of light verse, in which he excelled early on. The forty-two-page title poem is an exercise in virtuosity, but is also one of the most important statements of Updike's philosophy of life. The day after Updike died I passed this book around a classroom of undergraduates and a number of them found it startling and intriguing.