David Ferry (poet)

David Ferry (born 1924) is an American poet, translator, and educator. He has published eight collections of his poetry and a volume of literary criticism.

Life

Ferry was born in Orange, New Jersey, and grew up and attended Columbia High School amid the “wild hills” of suburban Maplewood, New Jersey.^[1] His undergraduate education at Amherst College was interrupted by his service in the United States Army Air Force during World War II. He ultimately received his B.A. from Amherst in 1946. He went on to earn his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and it was during his graduate studies that he published his first poems in The Kenyon Review.

From 1952 until his retirement in 1989, Ferry taught at Wellesley College where he was, for many years, the chairman of the English Department. He now holds the title Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley. He has also taught writing at Boston University. Ferry was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998, and he is a fellow of the Academy of American Poets.

In 1958, Ferry married the distinguished literary scholar Anne Ferry (died 2006), they had two children, Elizabeth, an anthropologist, and Stephen, a photojournalist.^[2] Before moving to his current home in Brookline, Massachusetts, Ferry lived across the Charles River in Cambridge, in the house where 19th century journalist and women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller lived before she joined the Brook Farm community.^[3]

Honors and awards

In 2000, Ferry’s book of new and selected poems and translations, entitled Of No Country I Know, received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress (for the best work of poetry for the previous two years). He is the author of a critically praised verse rendering of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. The poet W. S. Merwin has described Ferry's work as having an "assured quiet tone" that communicates "complexities of feeling with unfailing proportion and grace."

Ferry is also a recipient of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.

In 2011, Ferry was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.^[4]

In 2012, Ferry was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry for his book Bewilderment (University of Chicago Press).^[5] Bewilderment was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (2012, Poetry).^[6]

Works

Poetry and Translations

• On the Way to the Island Wesleyan University Press, 1960, ISBN 9780819520074
• Strangers: A Book of Poems. University of Chicago Press. 1983. ISBN 9780226244709. 
• Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992, ISBN 9780374162276
• Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations. University of Chicago Press. 1993. ISBN 9780226244785. 
• The Odes of Horace: A Translation. Macmillan. 1998. ISBN 9780374525729. 
• The Eclogues of Virgil Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000, ISBN 9780374526962
• Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations. University of Chicago Press. 1999. ISBN 9780226244860. 
• The Georgics of Virgil (2005)
• On This Side of the River: Selected Poems, Between the Lines, 2012, ISBN 9781904130529
• Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations. University of Chicago Press. 2012. ISBN 9780226244884. 

Literary Criticism

• The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth's Major Poems Wesleyan University Press, 1959; Literary Licensing, LLC, 2011, ISBN 9781258051549

References