“Writing is my one talent,” Mary Gordon once said. This came to mind as I finished Donald Hall’s memoir, Unpacking the Boxes, which I finally obtained from the library. (I was frugal long before the term recessionista emerged).

The book centers on the poet’s life before he met his wife, Jane Kenyon, as well as the years after her death. Hall has written about his life with Kenyon, including her wrenching departure, in other works, particularly the elegiac Without.

His life course has been marked by its central focus on poetry and poetry alone, fostered by supportive parents who led dutiful and disappointing lives. His mother was anorexic for a time, probably because of depression. His father worked as a manager at a dairy owned by his father, an experience so spiritually draining that he returned home shaken, pale, and teary. So when Donald began to write poems at an early age and to publish, he was much encouraged by his parents.

Hall exhibited a remarkable drive as he honed his skills as a poet. At Phillips Exeter, he learned the study skills and focus that would serve him well at Harvard and Oxford, although he was sometimes an angry outsider in a milieu of 1950s privilege and conformity. He put that experience to use. Writers need to avenge something, he reflects. Quoting Frost, he notes that “a poet needs a snout for punishment.” And on being alone: “I stayed in my single room, in love with silence and solitude, in love with writing poems.” The author developed an enormous capacity to sit with the page, refusing to get caught up in a culture that was moving toward its current dance of distraction.

Hall also read and read, devouring all the works of undiscovered poets and prose writers as he found them, ten books at a time: “I read the Great Writers with a capitalized, acquisitive joy, adding to my life list.”

Writing now from the perspective of “antiquity” as he amusingly calls it, Hall retains a dated machismo. To be a poet back then was to be A Man, to drink, to hit on younger women, perhaps because poetry was seen as such a fey endeavor by the larger culture. It required bad boy behavior.

More than sixty years ago, most of the poets he read were male; the largely unrecognized Emily Dickinson, he says, was “an eccentric eremite.” “Poetry is more erotic than fiction,” he claims. This, not the social strictures which rendered mid-century female artists as invisible as the secretaries in Mad Men, “is why female poets were so rare until the mid twentieth century,” when occurred “the vast increase in the number of good women poets due to sexual liberation.”

Good grief. Hall even loses his virginity at—where else? Bread Loaf.

But one can’t help admiring the writer’s pure sense of calling—his pursuit of “art’s peremptory love and arrogance,” as Seamus Heaney writes of Robert Lowell, in Elegy. One might dislike Hall’s egoism in demanding to be admitted to Bread Loaf as a high school student, or be jealous of his early publications in The New Yorker, of his name dropping when he arrives at Harvard, where he knew Frank O’Hara, Robert Bly, John Ashberry, of his coming life amongst the literati.

But there’s a great deal to be learned from that the way he tirelessly followed that call—locating himself in tradition through reading, pursuing his passion for the craft, giving it the attention it demanded. He kept his multi-tasking to a minimum, unlike many writers today, with their product-based “platform” of web sites, blogs, videos. Although Hall taught, he gave a university position up to move to New Hampshire with Kenyon, to devote himself to poetry alone. Almost overwhelmingly, the focus was on Hall’s one talent—writing.

So I admire Hall’s honesty about his drivenness in Unpacking the Boxes’. Hall’s arrogance is balanced by a cognizance of where he came from, of the randomness that gave him an artistic life, as opposed to the stunted one his father led. The privilege of this life is a central endeavor, this alone his life work.