All the Strange Hours was Eiseley’s autobiography, which was published in 1975, only two years before his death. One essay that tries to interpret Eiseley’s writing using material drawn from Hours and elsewhere begins with a recollection of a New York City meeting between W.H. Auden and Eiseley in the early 1970’s. Was that event an occasion for two poets to meet, or did Auden sense that Eiseley’s was a different sort of intellect, informed by science in ways other poets were not?
Auden himself had begun his academic career with a scholarship in natural science at Christ Church College, Oxford, but seems not to have staked out a position on the banister along the long corridor connecting the humanities to the sciences. In “Moon Landing,” he is dismissive of the achievement, yet in Eiseley’s later reports on their meeting, Eiseley reported Auden to be persona
ble and generous. Eiseley’s poem “And As For Man” is dedicated to Auden. Auden’s remark that “”Thousands have lived without love, not one without water” could well be misattributed to Eiseley.
The essay’s author, Gene V. Glass, a professor of Education at the Arizona State, but whose undergraduate degree was from Eiseley’s University of Nebraska, seems to sense the quicksand beneath the feet of a mind straddling science and art.
To regard Eiseley as a mystic does him no particular honor. The tag hangs awkwardly on a man who labored as a paleontologist during the most rigid and positivist half century of the science.
Auden, writing in the New Yorker in 1970, appeared to have read everything Eiseley had written, yet biographies of Auden may not have fully grasped the meaning of his interest (guessing here; I haven’t read the biographies myself). When the two poets met, one wonders whether the two sensed their divergent instincts for abstraction and greater meaning. Did Eiseley’s years of dedication to science bring a more persuasive, more specific insight? As Glass writes, it probably brought no comfort. “Eiseley’s thoughts were constantly drawn through sidereal time to empty space.”
Auden, writing in the New Yorker in 1970, appeared to have read everything Eiseley had written, yet biographies of Auden may not have fully grasped the meaning of his interest (guessing here; I haven’t read the biographies myself). When the two poets met, one wonders whether the two sensed their divergent instincts for abstraction and greater meaning. Did Eiseley’s years of dedication to science bring a more persuasive, more specific insight? As Glass writes, it probably brought no comfort. “Eiseley’s thoughts were constantly drawn through sidereal time to empty space.”
