Rachel Hadas

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Rachel Hadas (November 8, 1948 − ) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator.

[edit] Biography

The daughter of noted Columbia University classicist Moses Hadas and Latin teacher Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas, Hadas was raised in Morningside Heights, New York City. She received her baccalaureate at Radcliffe College in classics, her Master of Arts (1977) at Johns Hopkins University in poetry, and her doctorate at Princeton University in comparative literature (1982).

Marrying a man from the island of Samos and living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poets James Merrill and Alan Ansen. They strongly influenced her early work, as did Cavafy, whose work she translated, and Seferis.

During the height of the AIDS crisis, she led poetry workshops for those afflicted, and edited a number of their works with Charles Barber, experiences that informed her subsequent work.

She is often associated with the New Formalism school of poetry, and her work was included in landmark collections of New Formalism including Rebel Angels and A Formal Feeling Comes. Her subject matter ranges from her roots in the classics through the intimately personal, with memory a recurring theme throughout her work.

She has taught English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University since 1981, where, as of 2006, she is the Board of Governors Professor of English. Hadas has also taught poetry technique at the Rutgers Graduate level. She is married to composer George Edwards and lives with him and their son in Manhattan.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Starting from Troy, 1975
  • Slow Transparency, 1983
  • Form, Cycle, Infinity: Landscape Imagery in the Poetry of Robert Frost & George Seferis, 1985
  • A Son from Sleep, 1987
  • Pass It On, 1989
  • Living in Time, 1990
  • Editor with Charles Barber, Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop, 1991
  • Mirrors of Astonishment, 1992
  • Other Worlds Than This, 1994
  • The Empty Bed, 1995
  • The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths, 1995
  • Halfway Down the Hall, 1998
  • Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dreams, 2001
  • Indelible, 2001
  • Laws, 2004
  • Editor, Best American Poetry 2006, (Billy Collins, series ed.)
  • River of Forgetfulness, 2006