It is tempting to search in a poet's life for the themes of his poetry. Such an exercise is both easy and dangerous. It is easy because the most important themes are universal to both life and poetry. It is dangerous because the examination of such...

Richard Eberhart, 101, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet admired for mentoring generations of aspiring writers, died June 9 at his home in Hanover, N.H. No cause of death was reported. Mr. Eberhart wrote more than a dozen books of poetry during a career that...

Richard Eberhart, 101, a kite-flying poet who used everyday events such as encountering a dead groundhog or watching a squirrel cross a street to contemplate the fragility of life, died Thursday in his home in Hanover, N.H. Mr. Eberhart, who won the Pulitzer...

Hyperbolic titles invite dissent. So here’s mine: What makes Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” “the poem that changed America,” as the cover of this essay collection proclaims? Ginsberg might’ve responded by saying, as he did in a 1986 essay included here, that when San Francisco’s City Lights...

Hyperbolic titles invite dissent. So here’s mine: What makes Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” “the poem that changed America,” as the cover of this essay collection proclaims? Ginsberg might’ve responded by saying, as he did in a 1986 essay included here, that when San Francisco’s...

What I first admire about The Quarry, reading it whole, is how totally it is Richard Eberhart's. No matter what my response to single poems, I read them all as being demonstrably Eberhart's in rhythm, diction, and risk. However native this integrity, it's more than a negative virtue in the world of programmatic poetry where Eberhart's skilled juniors too often write what read like interchangeable translations of some Imagist Eskimo. It's no wonder that the Programmatic Poe...

Yeats remarked … that his grand intent was "to hold in a single thought reality and justice." That project—reconciling man's tropism toward the light with his experience of a world that seems, as often as not, designed to thwart it—is, of course, a perennial concern of poets. Few have been more preoccupied with the task than Richard Eberhart, who is perhaps the most distinguished survivor of a tradition that remained potent well into this century but that has been p...

The Visionary Farms is a drame à thèse which owes a great deal to the expressionist tendencies of the early plays of Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, and Elmer Rice. It is not in any important sense original; it does not enlarge the range of dramatic art; but it provides an opportunity of examining an interesting alliance between modern dramatic verse and those non-representational procedures which have been developed in the theatre in such plays as The Hairy Ape. (p. 223) The theme of ...