Gin Before Breakfast : The Dilemma of the Poet in the Newsroom

Archibald MacLeish wrote, "Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast." After more than forty years' experience as a journalist and poet, W. Dale Nelson gives a sharp and refreshing insight into the intriguing and tense relationship between these two very different fields of writing. His succinct studies of significant British and American poets, some famous and some obscure, range from Walt Whitman to Edmund Clarence Stedman, from Rudyard Kipling to Park Benjamin. In his chronicling of these powerful literary minds, Nelson raises compelling arguments about the journalistic environment and its effect on the development of poetic form, as well as the effects of changing print and mass communications on poetry. Book jacket.