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A lonely childhood
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A lonely childhood
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Views | Duration | ||
---|---|---|---|
1. My artistic parents | 3541 | 05:00 | |
2. I started out both clever and stupid | 948 | 00:51 | |
3. Moving to North Caldwell, New Jersey | 620 | 01:45 | |
4. A lonely childhood | 1 | 676 | 01:33 |
5. Still an outsider | 558 | 00:57 | |
6. The Death Club | 486 | 02:04 | |
7. Academic excellence at Montclair High School | 478 | 02:07 | |
8. Menacing totalitarian mandibles! | 399 | 02:33 | |
9. Finding the right girl for me | 899 | 03:29 | |
10. Amherst College: a good place for poets | 676 | 03:03 |
My parents moved when I was three to a gentleman's farm 20 miles out of New York City in North Caldwell, New Jersey. We were not the gentlefolk. The farm belonged to a retired textile manufacturer and millionaire named Joshua Dickinson Armitage. It was a big farm, about 450 acres. It had been largely constructed by Mr Armitage, so as to be a perfect gentleman's farm and a perfect reproof to those in England who had snubbed him for being in trade. He became a country gentleman, a squire. The reason we ended up on his property was that there was an old pre-revolutionary stone house there and when Mr Armitage met my father on some golf course or other and took to him, he had a Maecenas urge and suggested to my father that he move out to North Caldwell, New Jersey and inhabit that house for a very low rental. And so that's where my mother and father went and I with them, and it's where they stayed for 50 years.
Acclaimed US poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) published many books and was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He was less well known for creating a musical version of Voltaire's “Candide” with Bernstein and Hellman which is still produced throughout the world today.
Title: Moving to North Caldwell, New Jersey
Listeners: David Sofield
David Sofield is the Samuel Williston Professor of English at Amherst College, where he has taught the reading and writing of poetry since 1965. He is the co-editor and a contributor to Under Criticism (1998) and the author of a book of poems, Light Disguise (2003).
Tags: New York, New Jersey, England, Joshua Dickinson Armitage
Duration: 1 minute, 45 seconds
Date story recorded: April 2005
Date story went live: 24 January 2008