Eberhart’s life: Richard Eberhart was born in 1904 in Minnesota, the privileged son of a Hormel vice president. He grew up on a large estate called Burr Oaks (& named one of his books for it), and later said it was the trauma of his mother’s death from cancer & his father’s loss of fortune that made him a poet. He was educated at Dartmouth & Cambridge, worked on a steamer & for his wife’s family company, served as private tutor to the son of the King of Siam, taught college for many years & died in 2005 at 101.
Eberhart’s poems: Many of Eberhart’s poems deal with life & death in the natural world (like “The Groundhog,” one of his most oft-quoted poems). He also wrote about social issues -- after serving in the Navy during World War II, he published a number of poems on war (like “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment,” another famous one). He believed in inspiration & spoke of poems as “spells against death,” but he also wrote from specific experience & said “Poetry is a confrontation of the whole being with reality.”
Eberhart as teacher & mentor: In the 1950s, Eberhart settled into his vocation & began a long career as a college teacher & mentor to generations of younger poets. He taught at Princeton, Tufts, Brown & other universities, but his longest tenure was at Dartmouth, where he lectured into his 80s. He was also a founder of Poets’ Theatre, wrote a number of verse plays & fostered young talent in that genre. In 1956 he reported on the Beat scene in San Francisco for the NY Times & singled out Allen Ginsberg as most remarkable.
Books by Richard Eberhart:
- New and Selected Poems, 1930 - 1990 (Blue Moon Books, 1990)
- Collected Poems, 1930 - 1986 (Oxford University Press, 1988)
- The Long Reach: New and Uncollected Poems, 1948 - 1984 (New Directions, 1984)
- Selected Poems, 1930 - 1965 (Pulitzer Prize winner, New Directions, 1965)
- War and the Poet, An Anthology of Poetry Expressing Man’s Attitudes to War from Ancient Times to the Present (edited by Richard Eberhart, Greenwood Press, 1974)
