Michael Schmidt (Michael Norton Schmidt) Biography

poet, born in Mexico City, educated at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. In 1969 he became managing director of the Carcanet Press. He was Gulbenkian Fellow in Poetry at the University of Manchester from 1972 to 1975 and became editor of the literary periodical Poetry Nation in 1984. His first full collection was Bedlam and Oakwood (1970). Subsequent volumes have included My Brother Gloucester (1976), A Change of Affairs (1978), and Choosing a Guest: New and Selected Poems (1983). His earlier poetry, in which meditative and lyrical elements predominate, is characterized by its disciplined avoidance of technical or rhetorical ostentation. The Love of Strangers (1989), a sequence of twenty extended verse-memoirs, is strongly autobiographical in its accounts of meetings with individuals who influenced his intellectual and artistic growth. Schmidt has edited numerous anthologies of poems, most notably Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland (1983), and several collections of essays, including British Poetry since 1960 (1972). Among his other writings are two novels, The Colonist (1980) and The Dresden Gate (1986).