by Tim Gilmore, 6/26/2012
Born in Jacksonville, no one seems to know where, he got out, he got himself to Chicago, he edited Poetry magazine, the first magazine to publish T.S. Eliot, he won the Pulitzer in 1932 for The Flowering Stone, and he was, it’s said, despite the Pulitzer, man, despite the Pulitzer, it’s said, best known as one of the many lovers of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who won no Pulitzer, though everyone remembers her “Bluebeard Sonnet.” Dillon, George Dillon, somewhere near here entered this world, but no one knows if it was Springfield, or Riverside, 1906. No one knows and maybe 16 people now living have wondered. In this first edition of the 1927 Boy in the Wind—he was 21 years old!—
Whatever I love I shall forget:
Even the dove, and the violet,
Even the clover blossoming
In whirlpools in the grass in the spring…
Music, even—everything.
