Horace Gregory (Horace Victor Gregory) Biography

American poet and critic, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After graduation he moved to New York where he married the poet Marya Zaturenska and published his first volume of poems, Chelsea Rooming House (1930); it was his evocation of the crowded slums of New York's lower west side that briefly associated him with Marxist and proletarian writers of the depression. His other volumes of verse include No Retreat (1933), Chorus for Survival (1935), Poems, 1930–1940 (1941), Selected Poems (1951), Medusa in Gramercy Park (1961), Collected Poems (1964), and Another Look (1976). Like other modernist contemporaries, Gregory's verse frequently employs loose poetic structures and elliptical syntax, but his vision was more markedly social. From 1934 to 1960 he taught at Sarah Lawrence College (after retiring in 1961 he remained a Professor Emeritus until his death). Among his works as a distinguished translator from Latin are The Poems of Catullus (1931), Ovid's The Metamorphoses (1958), and The Love Poems of Ovid (1964). Notable among his works of literary and art criticism are Pilgrim of the Apocalypse: A Critical Study of D. H. Lawrence (1933) and The World of James McNeill Whistler (1959). He edited several anthologies, and with Marya Zaturenska published A History of American Poetry, 1900–1940 (1946).