Edgar Bowers was born in Rome, Georgia, and, as he says, he "grew up all over the South." In 1941, he was graduated from Boys High School in Decatur (a suburb of Atlanta) and subsequently entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Yvor Winters adds to these facts that Bowers comes from Presbyterian stock and "has the temperament of the mystical Calvinist, but... has too good a mind to accept the Calvinist faith or any other."

Bowers's first book, The Form of Loss (1956), won the Swallow Press New Poetry Series Award in 1955, and his most recent book, Living Together (1973), which contains new poems and selected poems from The Form of Loss and The Astronomers (1965), won the Commonwealth Club of California's 1973 Poetry Silver Medal. In 1963, poets Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes included Bowers in their important collection, Five American Poets. In 1989 Bowers won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry...