James Agee’s poetry is marked by deep emotion, spiritual searching, and an intense awareness of life’s beauty and sorrow. Best known as a novelist and journalist, Agee also wrote poems that reveal his lyrical sensitivity and moral passion. His collection Permit Me Voyage (1934) shows a strong influence of modernist poets like Hart Crane, yet his voice remains deeply personal and sincere. Agee’s poems often explore themes of faith, mortality, human suffering, and the desire for transcendence. He uses vivid imagery drawn from nature and the American South to express feelings of loneliness, compassion, and hope. His language is musical and complex, moving between prayer and confession. Through his poetry, Agee searches for a union between body and spirit, earth and heaven. Even in despair, his verses radiate tenderness and a longing for divine understanding. Though not as widely read as his prose, James Agee’s poetry remains a powerful expression of human vulnerability and the eternal quest for meaning in a troubled world.
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| James agee |
Sure On This Shining Night
Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.
Permit Me A Voyage
Take these who will as may be: I
Am careless now of what they fail:
My heart and mind discharted lie
And surely as the nerved nail
Appoints all quarters on the north
So now it designates him forth
My sovereign God my princely soul
Whereon my flesh is priestly stole:
Whence forth shall my heart and mind
To God through soul entirely bow,
Therein such strong increase to find
In truth as is my fate to know:
Small though that be great God I know
I know in this gigantic day
What God is ruined and I know
How labors with Godhead this day:
How from the porches of our sky
The crested glory is declined:
And hear with what translated cry
The stridden soul is overshined:
And how this world of wildness through
True poets shall walk who herald you:
Of whom God grant me of your grace
To be, that shall preserve this race.
Permit me voyage, Love, into your hands.
Lyrics for Lillian Hellman’s Candide
Reason, Magic, Skill and Love,
Frankly, I think poorly of.
Flesh and Figment, Brain and Breath.
All are parodies of Death.
Death alone cant paint it true;
Only Death can say for sure;
Who but Death can sing to you?
Death my dearest, sparse and pure.
Life is but a sorrowing haze
Through which we grope; and our five senses,
Trammeling snares. In all our way
Artists put their subtle fences:
Telling us that Life is All;
Cheating us with hints of glory;
Charming us. We fail, we fall
Stupefied, and buy their story.
