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As a poet, Fr. Earls was an unapologetic formalist, and in “Gas-House Poetry” he fiercely attacks free verse and that cultural phenomenon so odious to him as to require quarantining within quotation marks—“modern poetry.” He grants that all verse does not need to be formal but charges the moderns with producing only “pitiable mouthings, the insistent ejaculations of inmates in an insane asylum … ” He singularly excoriates Alfred Kreymborg, citing his poem that begins:
We have a one-room home,
You have a two-room, three-room, four-room,
We have a one-room home
Because a one-room home is all we have.
“[G]ive us back the mid-Victorian at its full,” begs the exasperated Fr. Earls, “or Celtic twilight in all its dimness, or puffs of mythology from old Parnassus.”
Fr. Earls’ “A Tree in the Tenement District” tells of a tree that has survived since Colonial days and which has overlooked the homes of succeeding generations of immigrants, the “Yankee, [who] counted with fretful care … the gain of every year,” the Munster man who “saw his dreams come true” and finally the “young Italian … [w]ho sees the future blossoming fair.” The refrain tells a little of the story of immigrants to Worcester:
America, Ireland and Italy,
All have known this poor old tree.
The highlight of Fr. Earls’ public career was bringing his friend G. K. Chesterton to Holy Cross in the winter of 1930. The visit of the British writer, probably the most famous convert to Catholicism of the time, attracted national interest. Chesterton enjoyed his sojourn, speaking of “Father Earls’ terrifying hospitality.”
Fr. Earls was an indefatigably productive man of letters—writing poems, plays, novels and essays—and maintaining voluminous correspondence with friends, both famous and unknown.
Elizabeth Reidy of Worcester remembers her uncle visiting when she was a young girl.
“My mother was 21 years younger than Fr. Earls, so he was more or less a father figure in the family,” she says. “He used to give a series of talks on Irish literature, and my mother would play the piano as part of that. He had lots of opportunities to travel, and he wrote to her and she would love those letters. She had wonderful memories of him.”
On Jan. 31, 1937, Fr. Earls boarded a train in New York City bound for Akron, Ohio, where he was to speak to alumni. He suffered a heart attack—was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital—and died a few hours later.
The Earls family name follows to this day in the roster of Holy Cross alumni, including Fr. Earls’ nephews the late Gerald ’40, Martin ’33, Francis ’39, Kevin ’43, and Arthur ’34. His grandniece Dr. Marian Earls ’76 and great grandniece Dr. Naomi Earls Leslie ’00 were the College’s first mother-daughter alumnae.
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