B.A.

Degree
Biography

Molly Peacock was born June 30, 1947, in Buffalo, New York, and grew up there. After obtaining her B.A. (magna cum laude) from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969, and her M.A. (with honors) at Johns Hopkins University, she worked in academic administration at Johns Hopkins for seven years before turning full-time to the writing of poetry. She was poet-in-residence for the Delaware State Arts Council in Wilmington from 1978 to 1981, at Bucknell University from 1993 to 1994, and the University of Western Ontario from 1995 to 1996, and she now has this position at the Poets' Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City. Between her first volume of poems in 1980 and sixth volume, The Second Blush, in 2008, Molly Peacock has been, to use the title of one of her most moving poems, the "Good Girl" of modern American poetry. She has an inexhaustible capacity for nourishing the public life of the spirit through the love of poetry. From 1975 to 1989, her poetry took roots in eight years' creative study at two of the oldest American artists' colonies, MacDowell (in the Monadnock region, New Hampshire) and Yaddo (at Saratoga Springs, New York). Beginning in the mid-1980s, Molly Peacock served as visiting lecturer at the YMCA in New York, Hofstra University, Columbia University, Barnard College, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Unterberg Poetry Center, and the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her life became especially public when, from 1989 to 1995, she served as President of the Poetry Society of America. Molly Peacock then nurtured its transformative Poetry in Motion project into being. Many cities now offer poems freely to their citizens in subway cars and buses all over America. Over the years, she has received many awards and fellowships: Creative Artists Public Service (1977), Ingram Merrill Foundation (1981), New York Foundation for the Arts (1985, 1990), National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1990), Lila Wallace Fellowship (1994), and Woodrow Wilson (five times).

Associated with the New Formalist movement of American women poets, Molly Peacock has a knack for writing so naturally that we may be surprised to find in her poems some difficult poetic forms (such as the rare telestich in "The Spell,", and the sonnet lurking in "The Lull"). Yet what makes Molly Peacock so wonderful a writer is that her poems make readers from all walks of life feel both that she confides in them, like a best friend, and that she is listening to them. She writes in How to Read a Poem ... and Start a Poetry Circle:

... the voice of the poem allows us to hear ourselves. It can be a great comfort to hear our own voices emanating through the letters of words that come from someone else. But it can also produce confusion, because we do not always allow ourselves to hear our inner voice and are alarmed by its sound. That is why we say our poets speak for us. Certain poems allow you to feel what you mean, even though you cannot dare to say what that is yourself.

To read the poems of Molly Peacock with care is to accept a dare. The risk that dare entails is a catch in the throat, and a sudden welling up of feelings we did not think we had.

Molly Peacock is married to Michael Groden, the eminent Joyce scholar, and they divide their time between Toronto and New York.

  • Peacock, Molly. And Live Apart: Poems. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. PS 3566 .E15 A8 Robarts Library
  • --. Raw Heaven: Poems. New York: Random House, 1984. PS 3566 .E15 R3 Robarts Library
  • --. Take Heart. New York: Random House, 1989. PS 3566 .E15 T3 Robarts Library
  • --. "What the Mockingbird Said." In Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry. Ed. James McCorkle. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. 343-47. PS 325 .C68 Robarts Library
  • --. Original Love. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. PS 3566 .E15 O75 Robarts Library
  • Boisseau, Michelle. Understory. Introduced by Molly Peacock. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. PS 3552 .O53U53 Robarts Library
  • --. Paradise, Piece by Piece. Putnam, 1998. [Memoir, semi-fictional.] PS 3566 .E15 Z472 Robarts Library
  • --. "From Gilded Cage to Rib Cage." In After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition. Ed. Annie Finch. Ashland, Oregon: Story Line, 1999. 70-78. PS 325 .A28 Robarts Library
  • --. "One Green, One Blue: One Point about Formal Verse Writing and Another about Women Writing Formal Verse." In New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, History. Ed. R. S. Gwynn. Ashland, Oregon: Story Line, 1999. 181-86. PS 325 .E9 Robarts Library
  • --. How to Read a Poem ... and Start a Poetry Circle. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999. PN 1590 .F55 T438 2000 Robarts Library
  • --. Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, 1975-2002. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Toronto: Penguin, 2002. PS 3566 .E15 C67 Robarts Library.
  • --. The Second Blush: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Also Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008.
  • --, ed. The Private I: Privacy in a Public World. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2001. BF 637 .P74 P75 Robarts Library [Anthology of essays on being alone.]
  • --, Elise Paschen, and Neil Neches, eds. Poetry in Motion: 100 Poems from the Subways and Buses. New York: Norton, 1996. PN 6101 .P542 1996 Library of Congress
Degree
Biography

John Byrne Leicester Warren, Lord De Tabley, was a literary scholar, a numismatist, and a botanist. Born April 26, 1835, Warren was educated at Eton College and then at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he graduated B.A. in 1859 and MA one year later. Between 1659 and his death in 1895, Warren published a dozen volumes of poetry, the last two of which -- Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical (1893) and its second series (1895) -- enjoyed success. His greatest achievement was his The Flora of Cheshire, published only in 1899.

  • Garnett, Richard. "Warren, John Byrne Leicester, third Baron de Tabley (1835–1895)." Rev. Megan A. Stephan. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Sept. 2010.
Degree
Biography

Born Augustin Nicholas Ruiz de Santayana y Borais on December 16, 1863, George Santayana was raised for eight years in Avila before moving with his family to America. He lived in Boston and was educated at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1889 with his doctorate and joined its faculty. After the publication of his The Life of Reason (1905-06), Santayana became a full professor, but he reputedly left the university in 1912, following his mother's death, because of administrative uneasiness about his unmarried state and his enjoyment of the company of young men. For the rest of his life, centered in Rome, he wandered through Europe as a man of letters. Very early in his academic career, Santayana published several volumes of poems, but his great success came as a philosopher, critic, and novelist. He died in Rome in 1952 and is buried in the Panteon de la Obra Pia espanola in Campo Verano Cemetery.

 

  • Santayana, George. Sonnets and Other Verses. Cambridge, Mass. and Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894. Enlarged edition: New York: Stone and Kimball, 1896.
  • --. A Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems. New York: Scribners, 1901.
  • --. Poems: Selected by the Author and Revised. New York: Scribners, 1923.
  • --. The Poet's Testament: Poems and Two Plays. Ed. John Hall Wheelock and Daniel Cory. New York: Scribners, 1953.
Degree
Biography

After taking his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, Joseph Warren Beach returned to Minneapolis in 1907 to the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, his undergraduate alma mater. Starting as Assistant Professor, he became Associate Professor in 1917 and Professor in 1924. Beach chaired the English Department from 1939 to 1948, after which time he retired. An expert in many literary figures -- Henry James, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and nineteenth-century literature in general -- Beach had a special love for poetry. His The Making of the Auden Canon (1957) was a masterful study of how Auden revised his earlier-published poems as his view of the world changed. Beach also brought out two volumes of his own poetry, Sonnets of the Head and Heart (1903) and Involuntary Witness (1950). By his first wife, Elisabeth Northrop (1871-1917, m. 1907), he had two sons, Northrop (1912-) and Warren (1914-). His second wife was Dagmar Doneghy, who married him in 1918. His brief life in The National Cyclopædia of American Biography, 47 (1965): 596-97, tells us that outdoor camping was an important part of his life. His letters and papers are in the Library of Congress.

Degree
Biography

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, born in Arezzo, Italy, in 1949, grew up in Montreal, Toronto, and Baltimore, and then moved to Toronto in 1967, where he studied as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto until the early 1970s. In his first career, as poet and literary editor, he paused after his eleventh collection of poems, Virgin Science (1986). Two years earlier he had taken vows as a brother in the Order of St. Augustine at the Marylake monastery north of Toronto. His second vocation, as a Roman Catholic priest, followed his Master of Divinity degree in 1990. In 1993 he was ordained as Father George and has served in various parishes in the Archdiocese of Toronto. During this time he rekindled his public life as a poet. A lover of women when young, and of God especially today, Di Cicco reminds one of John Donne, but unlike that gloomy Anglican bishop of London, he is a most gentle, cheerful, and big-hearted priest, and his poems are heart-breakingly compassionate of ordinary people and their lives. These poems are also, as Dennis Lee says, heroic. His books of poetry include

  • Di Cicco, Pier Giorgio. We Are the Light Turning. Toronto: Missing Link Press, 1975.
  • --. We Are the Light Turning. (revised ed.) Birmingham, Ab.: Tunder City Press, 1976.
  • --. The Sad Facts. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1977.
  • --. The Circular Dark. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1977.
  • --. Dancing in a House of Cards. Toronto: Three Trees Press, 1978.
  • --. A Burning Patience. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1978.
  • --. Dolce-Amaro. Alabama: Papavero Press, 1979, (limited edition).
  • --. The Tough Romance. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979. Reprinted in Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1990.
  • --. A Straw Hat for Everything. Birmingham, Ab.: Angelstone Press, 1981.
  • --. Flying Deeper Into the Century. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982
  • --. Dark to Light: Reasons for Humanness. Vancouver: Intermedia, 1983.
  • --. Women We Never See Again. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1984
  • --. Post-Sixties Nocturne. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1985.
  • --. Virgin Science. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986
  • --. Les Amours difficiles. Trans. Frank Caucci. Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1990. (The Tough Romance in French )
  • --. Living in Paradise: New and Selected Poems. Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2001.
  • --. The Honeymoon Wilderness. Toronto: The Mansfield Press, 2002.
Degree
Biography

William Herbert Carruth, born on April 5, 1859, near Osawatomie, Kansas, received his B.A. in modern languages at the University of Kansas (1880), studied at the Universities of Berlin and Munich, and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1889, 1893). He served as Professor of Modern Languages and then German at the University of Kansas throughout his life. His many academic publications in German studies included textbooks, editions, and translations. In 1908 G. P. Putnam's Sons published his Each in his own Tongue and Other Poems, titled after a poem that first appeared about the turn of the century in the New England Magazine and that very quickly became internationally celebrated. In June 1882, Carruth married Frances Schlegel, who served as Professor of Modern Languages at Kansas until her death in 1908. They had one daughter. On June 10, 1910, he married Katherine Kent Morton. Carruth died in 1924.

Degree
Biography

Born June 3, 1771, Sydney Smith was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he took a B.A. in 1792 and an M.A. in 1796. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1796 and became a curate in Nether Avon, near Amesbury. Moving to Edinburgh as a tutor, Smith published his first book of sermons and married Catharine Amelia Pybus. During this period he co-founded and edited the Edinburgh Review, to which he contributed much of his life. By 1803 the Smiths had gone to London, where he achieved a reputation as an outstandingly witty preacher at such places as Berkeley Chapel, Mayfair, the Foundling Hospital, and the Fitzroy Chapel. He lectured on moral philosophy at the Royal Institution from 1804 to 1806 and wrote his best-known work, Peter Plymley's Letters, on legalizing Roman Catholic worship. He served as priest at and lived near Foston-le-Clay, Yorkshire, in 1809, moved to Bristol to become a prebend in its cathedral in 1828, and three years later returned to London to take up a canonry at St Paul’s Cathedral. Besides his sermons and philosophic lectures, Smith's fame rests on his letters, and among them we find his occasional verse. He died at Green Street, London, on February 22, 1845, and interred at Kensal Green.

Degree
Biography
  • Schlenther, Boyd Stanley. "Whitefield, George (1714–1770)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
Degree
Biography
  • Hopkins, David. "Tate, Nahum (c.1652–1715)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008.