William De Witt Snodgrass
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William De Witt Snodgrass (born January 5 1926 in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania), pseudonym S. S. Gardons, is an American poet and a 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner.
Life
Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1926, and was educated at Geneva College. His studies were interrupted when, during WWII, he was drafted into the Navy, and sent to the Pacific. After demobilization, Snodgrass resumed his studies, but transferred from Geneva College to the University of Iowa, eventually enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which had been established in 1937, and was attracting as tutors some of the finest poetic talents of the day, among them John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell.
Career
Snodgrass's first poems appeared in 1951, and throughout the 1950's he published in some of the most prestigious magazines: Botteghe Oscure, Partisan Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Hudson Review. However, in 1957, five sections from a sequence entitled 'Heart's Needle' were included in Hall, Pack and Simpson's anthology, New Poets of England and America, and these were to mark a turning-point. When Lowell had been shown early versions of these poems, in 1953, he had disliked them, but now he was full of admiration.
By the time Heart's Needle was published, in 1959, Snodgrass had already won the The Hudson Review Fellowship in Poetry and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Poetry Prize. However, his first book brought him something more: a citation from the Poetry Society of America, a grant from the National Institute of Arts, and, most important of all, 1960's Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. It is often said that Heart's Needle inaugurated confessional verse. Snodgrass disliked the term. This is true, but it is also true that the genre he was reviving here seemed revolutionary to most of his contemporaries, reared as they had been on the anti-expressionistic principles of the New Critics. Snodgrass's confessional work was to have a profound effect on many of his contemporaries, amongst them, most importantly, Robert Lowell.
Snodgrass has a long and distinguished academic career behind him, having taught at Cornell, Rochester, Wayne State, Syracuse, Old Dominion, and Delaware Universities. He retired from teaching in 1994, and devotes himself full-time to his writing. He lives with his fourth wife, writer Kathleen Snodgrass (née Browne). Snodgrass created a truly modern work with De/Compositions by taking 101 classic poems and reconstructing them to prove to readers exactly how important the tiniest elements in poems can be.
Bibliography
Poetry
- Heart's Needle (1959)
- After Experience: Poems and Translations (1968)
- Remains (1970)
- The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977)
- If Birds Build with Your Hair (1979)
- These Trees Stand (1981)
- Heinrich Himmler (1982)
- The Boy Made of Meat (1983)
- Magda Goebbels (1983)
- D. D. Byrde Callying Jennie Wrenn (1984)
- The Kinder Capers (1986)
- A Locked House (1986)
- Selected Poems: 1957-1987 (1987)
- W. D.'s Midnight Carnival (1988)
- The Death of Cock Robin (1989)
- Each in His Season (1993)
- The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995)
- Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (2006)
- In Radical Pursuit: Critical Essays and Lectures (1975)
- De/Compositions (2001)
- To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (2002)
- Gallows Song (1967)
- Six Troubadour Songs (1977)
- Traditional Hungarian Songs (1978)
- Six Minnesinger Songs (1983)
- The Four Seasons (1984)
- Five Romanian Ballads, Cartea Romaneasca (1993)
- Selected Translations (1998)
The Führer Bunker (1981)
References
- W. D. Snodgrass (Twayne's United States authors series ; TUSAS 316) by Paul. Gaston
- The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass : Everything Human (Under Discussion) by Stephen Haven (Editor)
- "No music, no poem": Interviews with W.R. Moses & W.D. Snodgrass (Juniper book) by Roy Scheele
- W.D. Snodgrass,: A bibliography by William White
- Tuned and Under Tension: The Recent Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass by Philip Raisor (Editor)
- W.D. Snodgrass and The Fuhrer bunker: An interview by Paul L Gaston
- An examination of a book entitled "Discourses on the apostolical succession, by W.D. Snodgrass, D.D by William Johnson
- American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies : Supplement Vi, Don Delillo to W. D. Snodgrass (Supplement Vi) (American Writers Supplements) by Jay Parini (Editor)
- Everything Human: On the Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass by Richard Howard (Other Contributor)
External links
- Video of [W.D. Snodgrass] at the Peoples Archive
- [De/Composing W.D. Snodgrass, an essay]
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