Henri Cole

Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed poet HENRI COLE—author of Middle Earth, a Pulitzer finalist—for a discussion of his first book of prose, Orphic Paris.

About Orphic Paris

Henri Cole’s Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and prose poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet, explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family, poetry and solitude, the self and freedom.

Cole writes of Paris, “For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it. Instead of worshiping a creator or man, I cared fully for myself, and felt no guilt and confessed nothing, and in this place, I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew.” Written under the tutelary spirit of Orpheus—mystic, oracular, entrancing—Orphic Paris is an intimate Paris journal and a literary commonplace book that is a touching, original, brilliant account of the city.

Praise

"Henri Cole always has seemed to me the central poet of his American generation. Orphic Paris is a meditation both on Paris and on the inward spirit of Henri Cole. What emerges is a vision of reality worthy of Paul Valéry." —Harold Bloom

“For a foreigner, Paris can be the loneliest city in the world. But loneliness makes us good observers, and Henri Cole, this great poet, is alert to everything outside and inside himself, to his thoughts and impressions, to his memories and aspirations. We can watch poetry being born!” —Edmund White

"He has the voluptuary’s fastidious preoccupation with sensation—rather, say, an almost Japanese vocation for connoisseurship. But what is most striking in this work is its composure. Henri Cole’s poems do not strain for attention; for all their casual, anecdotal worldliness and natural diction, they project an eerie gravity. The poems’ shimmering, enigmatic tranquility coexists with intense feeling: they are clear without being stodgy, striking in their poise and delicacy and formal beauty without seeming, ever, mere exquisite diversions.  He is an artist of the greatest gifts." —Louise Glück