William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey

Whittemore, Reed

Houghton/Mifflin

Fifty Poems Fifty was first published in 1970.In this, the seventh volume of his poetry to be published, Reed Whittemore presents fifty poems, all making their first appearance in book form here.Commenting on this collection, John Malcolm Brinnin writes: “Whittemore has his own distinctive voice, his own spare, artfully simple way with a poem, and a grimly merry (or merrily grim) brand of wit that keeps a reader in a state of bemused expectation. His nonsense makes chilling good sense; and his poems inspired by affections are straightforward, touching, and without a twinge of sentimentality.A poet, critic, and editor, Mr. Whittemore was given outstanding recognition in 1969 when he received a major literary award from the National Council on the Arts. In presenting the award the council cited his “lifelong contribution to American letters.”The University of Minnesota Press has published two other collections of Reed Whittemore’s poetry, Poems, New and Selected and An American Takes a Walk.

Fifty Poems Fifty

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

University of Minnesota Press

<div>Fifty Poems Fifty was first published in 1970.In this, the seventh volume of his poetry to be published, Reed Whittemore presents fifty poems, all making their first appearance in book form here.Commenting on this collection, John Malcolm Brinnin writes: &#8220;Whittemore has his own distinctive voice, his own spare, artfully simple way with a poem, and a grimly merry (or merrily grim) brand of wit that keeps a reader in a state of bemused expectation. His nonsense makes chilling good sense; and his poems inspired by affections are straightforward, touching, and without a twinge of sentimentality.A poet, critic, and editor, Mr. Whittemore was given outstanding recognition in 1969 when he received a major literary award from the National Council on the Arts. In presenting the award the council cited his &#8220;lifelong contribution to American letters.&#8221;The University of Minnesota Press has published two other collections of Reed Whittemore&#8217;s poetry, Poems, New and Selected and An American Takes a Walk.</div>

Univ. of Minnesota Press

A brilliant tour de force, informative, unapologetically opinionated and a pleasure to read," exclaimed Newsweek about Reed Whittemore's recent book on biography, Whole Lives. The Washing Times proclaimed that his earlier work Pure Lives revealed biography as "a troubled genre-but as this book testifies brilliantly, a fascinating one." Whittemore continues to build upon his formidable reputation in the field of biography with Six Literary Lives, in which he deepens our understanding of six major twentieth-century writers.
Whittemore's subjects-Henry Adams, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Allen Tate-were writers of widely diverse talents and interests. However, Wittemore says, they all shared a "common climate of thought," a nineteenth-century view, now unfashionable, of literature's role in our culture. Although each biography could stand alone, Whittemore focuses on the ideas-literary, scientific, cultural-that united these six literary lives and emphasizes the shared impiety.
The book is an experiment in group biography with an ideological base. Using as a foundation American culture before World War II, which Daniel Bell described as "the end of ideology," Whittemore introduces these biographies with a discussion of the intellectual climate these writers shared. There is also a supplementary essay on three naturalists-Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, and Gerard Manley Hopkins-who shared similarly impious mind-sets.
Six Literary Lives reasserts values of character and art that have been belittled or attacked in the late twentieth century. The six figures studied here were all aggressive individuals ill at ease with solidarity. Their personal relations were slight, yet their common underlying stance in relation to their culture illuminates both that culture and, by comparison, our own.

Six Literary Lives: The Shared Impiety of Adams, London, Sinclair, Williams, Dos Passos, and Tate (Volume 1)

History & Criticism

University of Missouri

The poet as journalist: Life at the New republic

New Republic Book Co

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The feel of rock: Poems of three decades

Dryad Press

Feel of Rock: Poems of Three Decades

Dryad Pr

Frequently touched by whimsy, sometimes
plainly humorous, always serious in their
constant concern for the commonplace,
Reed Whittemore's poems retain a remarkable freshness in this retrospective of his best work from 1946 to the present.
What is perhaps most distinctive about
Whittemore's voice is how deceptively
ordinary it is. Here is someone who thinks
and talks astonishingly like everybody else
in poems that could have been written by
nobody else.

The Past, the Future, the Present: Poems Selected and New

Univ of Arkansas Pr

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Poetry History &amp; Criticism. Foreword by Garrison Keillor. In this literary memoir, Reed Whittemore—a self-considered bourgeois anarchist—gives us marvelous glimpses into his wide-ranging life as poet, little magazine editor, critic and essayist, journalist, biographer, and teacher. Writing in third person about his alter ego R, Whittemore looks back in a conversational, self-deprecating, voice that in his poetry and prose became recognizably his own. "Brilliant and original poet," wrote Victor Navasky, "provcoateur, literary lobbyist, anti-bureaucratic cultural bureaucrat, interdisciplinarian, his way of deepening, as distinguished from promoting, democracy has been to carry on its conversation in exemplary tropes. Our country and our culture are the better for it." "Reed Whittemore owns the only sort of immortality that matters to a writer which is to have written things that people remember years later."—Garrison Keillor "For what a long time Reed Whitmore has been a central figure in our national letters—his whole career has been one brave protest against dullness and stodginess."—X. J. Kennedy

Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Dryad Press, in association with U of Alaska Press

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