The Business Of The Dancer: Poems

The Business Of The Dancer is a posthumous collection of seventy-five poems by Edward Case (1923-1985). Shortly before his unexpected death at age sixty-two, Case selected these poems from more than one hundred fifty he had written, intending to publish them as a book under the title of the collection's opening poem. The volume is presented here for the first time.

Case's poems originally appeared in journals including The New Criterion, The American Scholar, Modern Age, The Freeman, and Saturday Review between the 1950s and 1980s. His poetry reflects a mid-century American voice, marked by precise language, intellectual clarity, and a philosophical tone engaging themes of life, mortality, politics, civics, love, and nature.

The poems are formal, employing meter and often using rhyme, yet are direct and accessible. Their economy is notable, with no excess and no wasted syllables. They exhibit a nuanced complexity, with words often bearing multiple meanings.

Educated in the 1940s at New York University and Columbia University, in the 1950s Case was a book review columnist for The Wall Street Journal and National Review and founded a syndicated literary journal titled Classic Features. Beyond letters, from 1960 until his death, he was a businessman, serving as President and CEO of a manufacturing company founded by his father. Additionally, he engaged in local politics and was elected to the Board of Education in Weston, Connecticut, serving as its chairman in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Business Of The Dancer brings to print the complete volume Edward Case intended to publish, offering contemporary readers a formally structured and disciplined body of work from an American poet of the postwar period. Serious but not without wit, the poems are the work of a well-read, broad intellect.