The Poetry of Hy Sobiloff

Something tells me Sobiloff should have stuck to his other careers.

From his encyclopedia entry:

Sobiloff, whose poetry was respected by many of his better-known contemporaries for its fresh, honest, unpretentious qualities, was also widely known as a filmmaker, industrialist, and philanthropist... While praising his work, both Aiken and Tate come close to representing the poet as a primitive, particularly by their use of words such as "folk" or "unaware..." Less positive were Kimon Friar's judgments of the collection, as presented in Saturday Review: "Sobiloff's poems are monolithic, his lines lack cadence, there is no melodic progression within a single stanza or between stanzas. Instead, we have staccato and precise descriptions of objects, but with little of the poetic realism of a William Carlos Williams or of the subtlety of Wallace Stevens."