Nationality United States | Name William Smith Role Poet | |
 | ||
Alma mater Washington University in St. LouisColumbia UniversityOxford University Education Columbia University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Washington University in St. Louis Awards United States Poet Laureate Books Laughing time, My Friend Tom: The Poet‑play, The world below the window, The Cherokee lottery, The Girl in Glass Similar People F D Reeve, Andrei Voznesensky, Nina Cassian | ||
Nysl william jay smith on my friend tom the poet playwright tennessee williams
William Jay Smith (April 22, 1918 – August 18, 2015) was an American poet. He was appointed the nineteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1968 to 1970.
Contents
- Nysl william jay smith on my friend tom the poet playwright tennessee williams
- Nysl william jay smith on words by the water and other poems
- Life
- Poetry
- Poems for children
- Translations
- Non fiction
- Editor
- Plays
- Reviews
- Awards
- References
Nysl william jay smith on words by the water and other poems
Life
William Jay Smith was born in Winnfield, Louisiana. He was brought up at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, south of St. Louis. Smith received his A.B. and M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, and continued his studies at Columbia University, and Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
In 1947 he married the poet Barbara Howes, and they lived for a time in England and Italy. They had two sons, David Smith, and Gregory. They divorced in the mid-1960s.
Smith was a poet in residence at Williams College from 1959–1967, taught at Columbia University from 1973 until 1975. He serves as the Professor Emeritus of English literature at Hollins University.
As of 2008, he lived in houses located in both Cummington, Massachusetts, and Paris, France.
Smith is the author of ten collections of poetry of which two were finalists for the National Book Award.
He has been member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1975.
His work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books,
Poetry
Poems for children
Translations
, Federico García Lorca (1994).
Non-fiction
Editor
Plays
Reviews
"When the whole history of twentieth-century American poetry is eventually written, it will surely be revealed that despite the apparently larger and often noisier triumphs of "open" forms, astonishingly good verse that we can call "metrical" or "formal" has continued to be written by some of the country's best poets – Smith himself along with his contemporaries and near-contemporaries Richard Wilbur, John Hollander, and Anthony Hecht. That Smith has written poems replete with rhythm, rhyme, wit, and melody – what Louise Bogan called "the pleasures of formal poetry," in an essay by the same name – is cause for celebration, homage, and gratitude."
"The far-reaching themes and variety of styles in William Jay Smith's poetry prove that commonplace ideas and everyday activities can be reinvented by lyrical language that enlightens and entertains the reader. His magical "Collected Poems" span a half-century of his life and the life of the nation, adding up to a literary and social history of our times in verse."
"The best poems in Smith's first book were unlike anything else in postwar American literature. Their quality of tone and vision was French, but not the French of any particular author. Instead Smith, a native of that international Paris of the imagination, was writing French poems in English, poems as close as anything by the Symbolists to that unattainable ideal of poésie pure. In a short poem like "A Note on the Vanity Dresser", the words themselves take over the initiative and create meanings and echoes of meaning that seem almost independent of the poet. This is a poem that shows language in the process of discovering itself."