Upon his graduation the following year, Updike and his bride went to London where he had won a Knox fellowship for study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.
He returned to the United States in 1955 and took a job as a staff writer at the New Yorker at the invitation of famed editor E. B. White, achieving a life-long goal. But after two years and many "Talk of the Town" columns, he left New York for Ipswich, Massachusetts, to devote himself full time to his own writing.
Twenty Years of Poetry
Updike began his remarkable career as a poet in 1958 by publishing his first volume, a collection of poems titled The Carpentered Hen. It is a book of light, amusing verse in the style of Ogden Nash and Robert Service. The poetry possesses several stylistic conventions shared by his fiction: careful attention to the sounds of words and the nuances of their meanings, the use of popular culture by identifying objects by familiar brand names, and the mimicry of the popular press through advertising language and newspaper editorial boosterism. For example, a trivial snippet from Life magazine becomes the basis of a poem called "Youth's Progress," which ostensibly details the physical metamorphosis of a young boy into an adult.
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