WELDON KEES

Essays | Spring 1993

WELDON KEES

Joseph Brodsky

If Weldon Kees were alive today, he would be 79 years old; but the first thing that makes this unthinkable is his poems. Their vehement bleakness makes it all too plausible that on July 19, 1955, when a car registered in his name was found near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the 41-year-old Weldon Kees had committed suicide.

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Spring 1993
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No body was ever found. Now and then a rumor would have him alive and well under an assumed name, south of the border. However, during the last 35 years, nothing even remotely close to his diction, either under his or an assumed name, has appeared in print. As far as this evidence goes, the poet is dead.

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