Richard Eberhart Biography

American poet, born in Austin, Minnesota, educated at the universities of Minnesota, Dartmouth, Cambridge, and Harvard. Eberhart spent eight years as a school teacher in Southboro where one of his pupils was Robert Lowell. At Cambridge in the late 1920s he became acquainted with the critical theories of William Empson, and of I. A. Richards who encouraged him as a poet. Eberhart's first book of poems, A Bravery of Earth (1930), was published in London. He has subsequently published nearly thirty volumes of poetry including Selected Poems 1930–65 (1965; Pulitzer Prize), Collected Poems 1930–76 (1976), and The Long Reach: New and Uncollected Poems 1948–84 (1984). His Collected Verse Plays appeared in 1962. A traditionalist by conviction and a formalist in technique, Eberhart blends his traditional values with his visionary belief in the power of the imagination to inscribe the transcendental in the ordinary. Thus his deceptively simple poetry is impacted with a questioning complexity, and works through the juxtaposition of the commonplace and the allusive, effecting a union between reason and imagination.