Jean Garrigue Biography

American poet, born in Evansville, Indiana, educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa; she held a succession of posts as an instructor in English and poet-in-residence at numerous American colleges and universities, chiefly in the New York area. Her first collection of poetry, The Ego and the Centaur (1947), was acclaimed for the rich precision of diction and imagery which characterizes all her writing. A more confident lyricism emerged in the formally complex poems of The Monument Rose (1953). Her subsequent collections, A Walk by Villa d'Este (1959) and Country Without Maps (1964), drew on her extensive travels in Europe and Asia in poems remarkable for the brilliant acuteness of her descriptive talent. New and Selected Poems (1967) was followed by Studies for an Actress (1973), a collection of elegiac poignancy in which an element of radical political disaffection becomes evident. Her other publications include the novella The Animal Hotel (1966), Essays and Prose Poems (1970), and the short critical study Marianne Moore (1965). Selected Poems appeared in 1992.