R. P. Blackmur

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Richard Palmer Blackmur (January 21, 1904 – February 2, 1965) was an American literary critic and poet. He was born and grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. An autodidact, Blackmur worked in a bookshop after graduating from high school, and attended lectures at Harvard University without enrolling. He was managing editor of the literary quarterly Hound & Horn from 1928 to 1930, at which time he resigned, although he continued to contribute to the magazine until its demise in 1934. In 1935 he published his first volume of criticism, The Double Agent; during the 1930s his criticism was influential among many modernist poets and the New Critics.

In 1940 Blackmur moved to Princeton University, where he taught first creative writing and then English literature for the next twenty-five years. He founded and directed the university's Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, named in honor of his colleague Christian Gauss. He met other influential poets while he taught at Princeton. They include W. S. Merwin and John Berryman. Merwin later published an anthology dedicated to Blackmur and Berryman, and a book of his own poetry (The Moving Target) dedicated to Blackmur.

[edit] External links

• Blackmur from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
• Blackmur from A Princeton Companion by Alexander Leitch (1978)
• "No Success Like Failure", a discussion of Blackmur's career from the New York Review of Books (abstract online; full text for subscribers only)