Reed Whittemore

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Reed Whittemore
BornEdward Reed Whittemore, Jr.
(1919-09-11)September 11, 1919
New Haven, Connecticut, USA
DiedApril 6, 2012(2012-04-06) (aged 92)
OccupationPoet
NationalityAmerican
Alma materYale University

Edward Reed Whittemore, Jr. (September 11, 1919 – April 6, 2012

Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1964, and in 1984.[2]

Biography

Born in

University of Maryland College Park
until 1984.

Whittemore was

.

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

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

  1. ^ Adam Bernstein (April 10, 2012). "Reed Whittemore, former poet laureate, dies at 92". The Washington Post. Retrieved April 11, 2012.
  2. ^ "Poet Laureate Timeline: 1953-1960". Library of Congress. 2008. Retrieved December 19, 2008.

External links