Robert Fitzgerald

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For the American politician by the same name, see Robert Fitzgerald (politician).

Robert Stuart Fitzgerald (12 October 1910–16 January 1985) was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin. He published translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and Sophocles' Oedipus plays (in collaboration with Dudley Fitts). In addition, he also composed several books of his own poetry. He grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and obtained his Bachelor's from Harvard in 1933.

Professionally, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard University. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. From 1984 to 1985 he was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, the United States' equivalent of a national poet laureate. In 1984 Fitzgerald received a L.H.D. from Bates College.

Fitzgerald is widely known as one of the most poetic translators into the English language. He also served as literary executor to Flannery O'Connor, who was a boarder at his home in Redding, Connecticut, from 1949 to 1951.^[1] He died in his Hamden, Connecticut home. ^[2]

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^ Various sources incorrectly cite Ridgefield, Connecticut as Fitzgerald's home from the 1940s into the 1960s. He, in fact, lived on Seventy Acres Road in adjacent Redding, Connecticut. He and Flannery O'Connor used a Ridgefield mailing address because, in those days, rural delivery to that portion of Redding was done by the Ridgefield post office.
^ Mitgang, Herbert (January 17, 1985). Robert Fitzgerald, 74, poet who translated the classics. New York Times