Reed Whittemore

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Edward Reed Whittemore II (born September 11, 1919 in New Haven , Connecticut , † April 6, 2012 in Kensington , Maryland ) was an American university professor , poet and writer who was Poet Laureate from 1964 to 1965 and again between 1984 and 1985 the Library of Congress was. He also became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975 .

Life

Edward Reed Whittemore II, son of Edward Reed Whittemore and his wife Margaret Eleanor Carr Whittemore, began after school first an undergraduate degree at Yale University , which he finished in 1941 with a Bachelor of Arts (AB). After the entry of the United States into the Second World War he joined in 1941 in the US Army Air Forces on (USAAF) and was last to Captain (Captain) transported. After the end of the war, he published his first collection of poems, Heroes & Heroines , in 1946 . He also completed postgraduate studies at Princeton University in 1946 and, after graduating in 1947, accepted a professorship for English at Carleton College , where he taught until 1966. During this time, between 1962 and 1964, he was head of the English department there.

Whittemore was from 1964 to 1965 for the first time Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress and then between 1966 and 1968 employee of the National Institute Public Affairs . He was also owner of the 1967 Bain-Swiggett - lectureship at the University of Princeton. In 1968 he took over a professorship at the University of Maryland and taught there until 1984. In addition to his teaching activities, he worked between 1969 and 1974 as literary editor of the weekly newspaper The New Republic . In 1971 Carleton College awarded him a Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) And he was also awarded the Award of Merit Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1971. He also became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975 . After serving as the Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress for the second time between 1984 and 1985, he served as the Maryland State Poet Laureate from 1985 to 1988 .

His marriage to Helen Lundeen on October 3, 1952 resulted in two daughters and two sons.

Publications

In addition to numerous collections of poetry, he has published biographical and literary works on William Carlos Williams , Jack London , Upton Sinclair , John Dos Passos and Allen Tate . His works include:

  • Heroes & Heroines (1946, poems)
  • An American Takes a Walk (1956, poems)
  • The Self-Made Man (1959, poems)
  • The Boy from Iowa (1962, poetry)
  • Poems, New and Selected (1967, poems)
  • Fifty Poems Fifty (1970, poems)
  • The Mother's Breast and the Father's House (1974, poems)
  • William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey (1975, biography)
  • The Feel of Rock: Poems of Three Decades (1982, poems)
  • The Past, the Future, the Present: Poems Selected and New (1990, poems)
  • Six Literary Lives: The Shared Impiety of Adams, London, Sinclair, Williams, Dos Passos, and Tate (1992, literary review)
  • Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet (2007, autobiography)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Whittemore, Reed
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Whittemore II, Edward Reed (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH New Haven , Connecticut
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 2012
Place of death Kensington , Maryland