Benevolent Father

The young artist should "avert the gaze from self...and penetrate the maze" lest self-pity destroy his creativity. Following his own credo, John L. Sweeney, as critic, teacher, and Curator of Lamont's Poetry Room, has, for the last ten years, been a benevolent father for Harvard's young poets.

How much of his own poetry he has shyly hidden from the public only John Sweeney knows. "An eminently unpublished poet imminently publishing," according to John Mason Brown, Sweeney's study of Henry James' art criticism will be issued in London this summer. His past works include a few essays for "little" magazines, an edition of the writings of Dylan Thomas, and his 1954 Phi Beta Kappa poem "An Arch for Janus." A critical evaluation of directions in modern poetry, written in collaboration with Elizabeth Drew and a few minor poems complete his Widener listing.

Shunning academic advancement and the glory of publication, Sweeney is primarily a teacher and a scholar. He is "a superb instructor, thoroughly Socratic," one of the section men in his Humanities 3 course has said. "He brings his class by questions to points that I could present only in a lecture."

Much of his teaching, however, consists of informal work with students who come to him with their own poetry. His sympathetic enthusiasm makes him an ideal audience. His criticism, delivered with vigorous precision, is helpful and encouraging. In their early years, poets like Leslie Fiedler, Ruth Stone, and Delmore Schwartz benefited from Sweeney's sponsorship.

"Jack Sweeney's attitude toward my writing has always been very encouraging," said Richard Wilbur, now a Wellesley professor, who worked with him several years ago. When Wilbur published his first, unheralded book of poetry, his critic bought several copies and sent them to friends with his enthusiastic recommendation. This concern for young poets is reflected in Sweeney's efforts to purchase their works for the Poetry Room and the English collection of Widener.

Sweeney came to Harvard in 1940 to work with I.A. Richards on the Committee on Communications--using Richard's "Basic English" to prepare simplifications of the Bill of Rights and immigration documents. Curator of the Poetry Room since 1943 and selection specialist for Widener since 1946, Sweeney controls the purchase of modern English and American writings for the working collection of the University libraries. In the Poetry room, he has assembled a thousand-reel tape collection of recordings by contemporary poets, including rare readings by Wallace Stevens. "Sweeney is the sort of man for whom Stevens would overcome his reluctance to record," one colleague said. "With his charm and intelligence, he is a person Stevens could trust."

Many disciplines are fused in his personality--the Catholic training of his youth and college years at Georgetown, graduate study at Magdalene College, Cambridge, his years as a lawyer, and extensive European travel. At Cambridge, his supervisor was I.A. Richards, whose standards of artistic excellence based on absolutes conditioned Sweeney's critical tastes. Working with Richards and William Empson in Basic English stimulated in appreciation of poetry's lingual exactness and internal architecture.

With his brother James Johnson Sweeney, former head of the Museum of Modern Art, Sweeney developed an early liking for painting. While he owns works by Bracque, Picasso, Leger, and Gris, he protests, in his self-effacing manner, that "I know nothing about aesthetics as a professional discipline or as a philosophical study. But the experience," he continues, "of making a judgment and enjoying a painting in the Fogg--or reading a poem--has been a vital part of my education."

This humble search for the meaning of human expression is John Sweeney's passion. "A dilletante in the best sense," as a friend described him, he approaches art with the scholar's understanding and the poet's enthusiasm.