Poet and Professor Peter Sacks. Photo by Rose Lincoln.

Peter Sacks grew up swimming and surfing in the Indian Ocean along South Africa's coast.

He spent so much time in the waters off his native Natal province that school, he said, was something he did between immersions.

In a way it still is.

A poet and professor of English and American literature and language, Sacks still swims every day. He does wintertime laps in a pool, waiting until he can again take to the ocean, with its mysterious depths and primal rhythms.

"It's a very important part of my life. In the summer, I swim in the ocean every day," Sacks said. "I feel the desire to immerse myself in another element which is uncontrollable, mysterious, beautiful, rhythmic, and which is related to my drive to engage with poetic language as a medium."

Between swims, Sacks is a poet and poetry critic. He has just completed his fourth book of poems. Called O Wheel, it is scheduled to be published in January 2000 by the University of Georgia Press.

In addition to O Wheel, Sacks has written three volumes of poetry and two books of criticism, one of which, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spencer to Yeats, won him the Christian Gauss Award.

Lawrence Buell, the John P. Marquand Professor of English and chair of the Department of English and American Literature and Language, called The English Elegy "one of the most important books on one of the most important English poetic traditions."

Sacks has several critical projects in the works, including a book on Yeats and another on lyric poetry at the turn of the century.

"He's a gracious, charming, and thoroughly delightful person who's an excellent teacher, a scholar of renown, and a poet of note," Buell said. "We feel very lucky and privileged to have him as a colleague."

A Love of Wildness

Sacks, 48, has a bit of a split personality when talking about his youth in South Africa. His deep love of the place, the mountains, the seacoast, the sea, shows in his poems and is balanced by his abhorrence for the racist regime that was in power throughout his youth.

The son of a doctor, Sacks grew up thinking he also would become a doctor. He graduated early from high school and, as is the practice in South Africa, went directly to medical school. But at just 16, Sacks felt he didn't know enough, hadn't seen enough of the world yet. So he decided to visit America.

As an exchange student in Detroit in the late '60s, Sacks witnessed America's own racial tensions and struggle for justice.

"I found it grimly challenging, a year of enormous racial conflict," Sacks said. "I found it to be a time of a profound opening of my mind."

Sacks returned home at the end of the year and went to the University of Natal to study political science and philosophy. He became involved in the student anti-apartheid movement and worked with Steven Biko, an anti-apartheid activist killed by South African police in 1977.

To add inner conflict to a time of outer turmoil, Sacks was drafted. He spent three months in military training before receiving a scholarship to Princeton and heading again to the United States.

At Princeton he gained more than his 1973 bachelor's degree in English.

He gained poetry.

Sacks had never been interested in poetry before Princeton. Once, there, though, Sacks found himself spending a lot of time alone. As he studied literature, he found it was the poets who were often his companions.

"It gradually occurred to me that what I was spending much of my time doing was reading poems," Sacks said. "If I was walking around campus with a book, it was a book of poetry. If I was up all night, which I was quite a lot, it was reading poetry."

Sacks studied literature at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, gaining an M.Phil. in 1976 and taking time to trek through South America for four months to feed his love of the wild. He went on to Yale University, where he earned a doctorate in English in 1980.

While in graduate school he met his future wife, painter Barbara Kassel, who is currently teaching painting at the Carpenter Center and is an associate of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.

Sacks became an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1980. He was promoted to associate professor in 1986 and full professor in 1989. He came to Harvard in 1996 as a professor of English and American literature and language. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997.

Sacks, who will be doing a reading at the Fogg Museum on Sunday, April 18 at 3 p.m., said he thought his career would be that of a critic, not a poet. But during his last year at Yale, he began writing poetry.

South Africa is the setting for many of his poems. His love of wild places shows up in mountains and other natural settings. And the ocean's special role in his life shows up, too, speckling his poems with images of the water, of lighthouses, of fish, of swimming. Though he swims regularly, Sacks says he doesn't emerge with new verse in his mind. He just swims.

The ocean, mixed with language and feeling, flows out later. On paper.

Sacks' enthusiasm for poetry comes out during his classes, according to Dan Chiasson, a teaching fellow in English and Sacks' teaching assistant in English 184, Fundamentals of Lyric Poetry.

"You sense the poems are very alive for him," Chiasson said. "Though he ends up analyzing the poems, he begins in emotion. The person who writes poems is always in the room with you."

He can't forget them:
night, the swimmer and the words
Only the swimmer....

Night swims, the swimmer
passes between stars that drop
below the surface

of the words for nightfall,
and the words swim.
Darkening they glide.

After long pauses
they begin again. Only
the swimmer stays down.

-- "Only the Swimmer," by Peter Sacks. From the book, Natal Command.

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