American poet
Edward Reed Whittemore, Jr.
(September 11, 1919 – April 6, 2012
[1]
) was an American
poet
, biographer, critic, literary journalist and college professor. He was appointed the sixteenth and later the twenty-eighth
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
in 1964, and in 1984.
[2]
Biography
[
edit
]
Born in
New Haven, Connecticut
, Whittemore attended
Phillips Academy
and received a
Bachelor of Arts
from
Yale University
in 1941. As a sophomore at Yale, he and his roommate
James Angleton
started a literary magazine called
Furioso
which became one of the most famous "
little magazines
" of its day and published many notable poets including
Ezra Pound
and
William Carlos Williams
. "It was the
ne plus ultra
of little magazines" according to
Victor Navasky
. The magazine was published intermittently until 1953. After service in the Army, he published his first volume of poetry in 1946. From 1947 to 1966, he was a professor of English at
Carleton College
. While at Carleton he renewed his magazine under the name the
Carleton Miscellany
and published many first-time poets such as
Charles Wright
. He taught at the
University of Maryland College Park
until 1984.
Whittemore was
Poet Laureate
of
Maryland
and twice served as
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry
to the
Library of Congress
.
His poetry is notable for its wry and deflating humor. The poet
X.J. Kennedy
remarked that "his whole career has been one brave protest against dullness and stodginess." His book
The Mother's Breast and the Father's House
was a finalist for the
National Book Award
for poetry. He is the recipient of the National Council on the Arts Award for lifelong contribution to American Letters and the Award of Merit Medal from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters
.
The poet
James Dickey
wrote of Reed in Poetry magazine that, “as a poet with certain very obvious and amusing gifts, he is almost everyone’s favorite. Certainly he is one of mine. Yet there are dangerous favorites and inconsequential favorites and favorites like pleasant diseases. What of Whittemore? He is as wittily cultural as they come, he has read more than any . . . man anybody knows, has been at all kinds of places, yet shuffles along in an old pair of tennis shoes and khaki pants, with his hands in his pockets.”
In November 2007
Dryad Press
published his memoir,
Against The Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet
, with an introduction by
Garrison Keillor
who took a class from him in his youth calling him a "movie-star handsome poet and teacher" who "owns the only sort of immortality that matters to a writer, which is to have written things that people remember years later . . . What makes R.W. permanently readable and relevant is his wit and humor, which is the underground spring that keeps the gardens of American literature green.
Always self-effacing, Whittemore describes himself at 21 in his memoir: "He was nearsighted but wore no glasses. He had a medium-grade mind and managed to mix intellectual modesty with sudden arrogance. . . . He preferred to think of himself as a genuine rebel yet couldn't help being polite."
He was married to Helen Lundeen and had four children: Cate, Ned, Jack, and Daisy.
Bibliography
[
edit
]
- Poetry
- Heroes & Heroines
(1946)
- An American Takes a Walk
(1956)
- The Self-Made Man
(1959)
- The Boy from Iowa
(1962)
- Poems, New and Selected
(1967)
- Fifty Poems Fifty
(1970)
- The Mother's Breast and the Father's House
(1974)
- The Feel of Rock: Poems of Three Decades
(1982)
- The Past, the Future, the Present: Poems Selected and New
(1990)
- Ten from Ten & One More
(2007)
- The Season of Waiting: Selected Poems: 1946-2006 (Hebrew trans by Moseh Dor)
(2007)
- Prose
- The Little Magazine and Contemporary Literature
(1966)
- From Zero to Absolute
(1967)
- The Fascination of the Abomination: Poems, stories, essays
(1963)
- William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey
(1975)
- The Poet as Journalist: Life at the New Republic
(1976)
- Pure Lives: The Early Biographers
(1988)
- Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern Biography
(1989)
- Six Literary Lives
(1993)
- Against The Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet, a Memoir by Reed Whittemore
(2007)
References
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]
|
---|
International
| |
---|
National
| |
---|
Academics
| |
---|
Other
| |
---|