Edward Weismiller

Last updated
Edward Weismiller
Born(1915-08-03)August 3, 1915
DiedAugust 10, 2010(2010-08-10) (aged 95)
NationalityAmerican
Genrepoetry

Edward Ronald Weismiller (August 3, 1915 Monticello, Wisconsin - August 25, 2010 Washington, D.C.) was an American poet, scholar and professor of English, George Washington University. . [1]

Contents

Life

He was raised in Wisconsin and Vermont. In 1936, the twenty-year-old Edward Weismiller became the youngest poet to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. [2]

He graduated from Cornell College in 1938, from Harvard University with a master’s in 1942, and from Oxford University, with a D.Phil. in 1950, where he was a Rhodes scholar. [3] [4]

Professor Weismiller, an eminent scholar of John Milton’s poetry, came to Washington, DC in 1968 to study original source materials in the Folger Library, and stayed on to teach in the English department of the George Washington University. After his retirement in 1980 he remained there, reveling in the city’s beauty, variety, and cultural ferment. He was in love with words and stories and had a gift for making and keeping friends. An inspiring teacher, he worked to instill the love of beautiful and precise language in his students, and many of them went on to success as writers, artists, actors, teachers.

Weismiller was proud of what he called a nice American success story. His father, Jacob Weismiller, came of German-Swiss stock; his mother, Georgia Wilson, was of Scottish descent. Young Edward grew up inventing word games and creating crossword puzzles for his sister Jean. The family lived on a tiny farm in rural Wisconsin and the children went to a small country school where Edward won good grades from his teachers and attacks from a bully. His mother died when he was 11, shattering the family. Two years later, taken in by his older sister Luverne, he began doing better in high school and writing songs and poetry. Gently guided by his brother-in-law, paper chemist Westbrook Steele, he won scholarships to Swarthmore and then to Cornell College in Iowa, where he fell in love with Milton’s poetry and began to publish his own. At age 20 he became the youngest Yale Younger Poet when his first book of poems, The Deer Come Down, was selected for publication by series editor Stephen Vincent Benet.

In 1936 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, soon interrupted when England and Germany declared war. Repatriated with the other U.S. students, he earned his master's degree and taught at Harvard, where he founded lifelong friendships with some of the best poets and writers of his generation. A sojourn at Yaddo nourished his talent. He also met and married Frances Merewether Power of Redlands, California, a budding poet and journalist; their first child was born in 1942. He translated a prize-winning French novel, The Young Concubine, and began his second book of poems, The Faultless Shore, published after the war, in 1946.

When the U.S. joined the European war, Weismiller’s life took an astonishing twist. In a midnight phone call from the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), he was recruited for counterespionage. (He never knew who had recommended him.) He chose to earn his required commission and startle his friends—and the Commandant—by joining the Marine Corps. On detached service in Europe, he was trained by the British secret services MI5 and MI6 and watched the terrible beauty of firebombs falling on the roofs of London. Deployed to Cherbourg, France, after D-Day, he became the first American officer to run a captured enemy agent back against the Germans. Eventually he was put in charge of counterespionage in the American Zone in occupied Germany. He was awarded a Bronze Star and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance française. When he turned in his final report, he was told that it was so highly classified that he would never see it again. (He later heard that the British, apparently less secretive, were using their copy in counterespionage training.)

After the war Weismiller declined an invitation to join the newly formed CIA, which succeeded the OSS; instead he went home to his family in Southern California and commenced work on his novel, The Serpent Sleeping, sustained by a Guggenheim writing fellowship. In 1948 the Rhodes Trust invited back the scholars whose time had been cut short by the war, allowing them to bring their new families, so he earned his doctorate from Oxford. He went on to teach poetry, creative writing, and Milton at Pomona College. Over the years four more children were born.

In 1968, now divorced, he came to Washington and began a new phase of life. His third book of poems, The Branch of Fire, was published in 1970, and he was invited to give a reading of his poems at the Library of Congress in 1979. After retiring in 1980 he continued to write and reap honors. He contributed to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry, was an editor of the Variorum Milton series (a compendium of the best modern scholarship), and received the 2001 Robert Fitzgerald Award for lifetime contribution to the study of metrics and versification. In 2002, at age 87, he became the oldest Yale Younger Poet when the press published Walking Toward the Sun, with a foreword by W. S. Merwin (then U.S. poet laureate).

Weismiller always saw himself as a citizen soldier, not professional military, but his service affected him deeply. The war’s ambience and human lessons permeated his 1962 novel, The Serpent Sleeping, recently republished in a British series of classic spy novels. FOIA requests by historian Tim Naftali got his final OSS report declassified, setting off a much-enjoyed series of interviews with historians and popular writers on what his war was really like. Weismiller had been one of the few Marines stationed in Europe; most were in the South Pacific. His unusual situation eventually yielded a bonus: a White House invitation to attend the 50th anniversary celebrations of V.E. Day, traveling to England, France, Prague, and all the way to Russia in a special tour with distinguished veterans from all the services, then-Vice President Gore, and then-Secretary of the Army Togo West.

His work has appeared in Kenyon Review [5] and The Atlantic. [6]

In 1941, Random House hired Weismiller, then a 26-year-old student, to translate the first award-winning novel of Franco-Khmer poet Makhali-Phal into English. La Favorite de dix ans was published in New York in 1942 as The Young Concubine. In 2008, Professor Weismiller began advising a literary team working to produce an updated version of his original translation incorporating cultural background material unavailable in 1941. [7]

He lived in Washington, D.C. [8] until his death on August 25, 2010, at 95.

Awards

Works

Novels

Anthologies

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E. E. Cummings</span> American author (1894–1962)

Edward Estlin Cummings, who was also known as E. E. Cummings, e. e. Cummings and e e Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Penn Warren</span> American poet, novelist, and literary critic

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edgar Lee Masters</span> American poet

Edgar Lee Masters was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness, An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Vincent Benét</span> Poet, short story writer, novelist (1898–1943)

Stephen Vincent Benét was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He wrote a book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body (1928), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and for the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) and "By the Waters of Babylon" (1937). In 2009, Library of America selected his story "The King of the Cats" (1929) for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cleanth Brooks</span> American literary critic and professor

Cleanth Brooks was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" and codifying the principles of close reading.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Muriel Rukeyser</span> American poet, writer, and political activist (1913–1980)

Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist. She wrote poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Walker</span> American poet and writer

Margaret Walker was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include For My People (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Randall Jarrell</span> American writer (1914–1965)

Randall Jarrelljə-REL was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.

Douglas Valentine LePan was a Canadian diplomat, poet, novelist and professor of literature.

David Lehman is an American poet, non-fiction writer, and literary critic, and the founder and series editor for The Best American Poetry. He was a writer and freelance journalist for fifteen years, writing for such publications as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. In 2006, Lehman served as Editor for the new Oxford Book of American Poetry. He taught and was the Poetry Coordinator at The New School in New York City until May 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Hirsch</span> American poet and critic (born 1950)

Edward M. Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Hugo</span> American poet

Richard Hugo, born Richard Franklin Hogan, was an American poet. Although some critics regard Hugo as primarily a regionalist, his work resonates broadly across place and time. A portion of Hugo's work reflects the economic depression of the Northwestern United States, particularly Montana. Born in the White Center area of Seattle, Washington, he was raised by his mother's parents after his father left the family. In 1942 he legally changed his name to Richard Hugo, taking his stepfather's surname. He served in World War II as a bombardier in the Mediterranean. He left the service in 1945 after flying 35 combat missions and reaching the rank of first lieutenant. Hugo's experiences in the military are referenced in one of his books of poetry, Good Luck in Cracked Italian. == Hugo received his B.A. in 1948, and his M.A. in Creative Writing four years later, from the University of Washington where he studied under Theodore Roethke. He married Barbara Williams in 1952, the same year he started working as a technical writer for Boeing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Gilbert</span> American poet and writer 1925-2012

Jack Gilbert was an American poet. Gilbert was acquainted with Jack Spicer and Allen Ginsberg, both prominent figureheads of the Beat Movement, but is not considered a Beat Poet; he described himself as a "serious romantic." Over his five-decade-long career, he published five full collections of poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Tate (writer)</span> American poet

James Vincent Tate was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Morris Meredith Jr.</span> American poet

William Morris Meredith Jr. was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980, and the recipient of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Michael Ryan has been teaching creative writing and literature at University of California, Irvine since 1990.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maurice Manning (poet)</span> American poet (born 1966)

Maurice Manning is an American poet. His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by W.S. Merwin. Since then he has published four collections of poetry. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he oversees the Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and is a member of the poetry faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

Jeffrey W. Harrison is an American poet. Born in Cincinnati, he was educated at Columbia University, where he studied with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro. His most recent poetry collection is Into Daylight, which follows The Names of Things: New & Selected Poems. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines, including The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, Poets of the New Century. His honors include Pushcart Prizes, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Amy Lowell Traveling fellowships. He has taught at George Washington University, Phillips Academy, and College of the Holy Cross. He is currently on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He lives in Dover, Massachusetts.

Mildred Dodge Jeremy Ingalls was an American poet and scholar of Chinese literature.

Nelly-Pierrette Guesde, best known by her pen name Makhali-Phâl, was a French Cambodian poet and novelist.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.