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Milton Kessler (1930-2000) was a poet and academic who spent most of his career at Binghamton University. He was one of the founders of the institution's creative writing program.
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Milton Kessler (1930-2000) was a poet and academic who spent most of his career at Binghamton University. He was one of the founders of the institution's creative writing program.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Kessler grew up in New York City in a Jewish family. He was a volunteer spear carrier and prop boy at the New York Metropolitan Opera as a teenager, and he had classical training as a singer. He worked selling cloth at The Sample in Buffalo, New York as a young adult, and he married his wife, Sonia, while working a range of modest jobs. [1]
He received his B.A. from the University of Buffalo (later subsumed by the State University of New York) in 1957. Following non-degree graduate studies at Harvard University during the 1957–1958 academic year, [2] he moved to the University of Washington, where he briefly served as a teaching assistant and received his M.A. in English in 1962. From 1958 to 1963, he was an assistant instructor and doctoral student in English at Ohio State University, where he was informally mentored by John Crowe Ransom of nearby Kenyon College. During this period, Ransom recommended Kessler for a Robert Frost Fellowship in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summer of 1961.
After publishing his first collection of poetry in 1963, he abandoned his doctoral studies. A lectureship in English at Queens College (1963-1965) led to a tenure-track post at Binghamton University as an associate professor of English in 1965; there, his students included 1968 class valedictorian and future public intellectual Camille Paglia. Paglia later wrote that the biggest impact on her thinking were the classes taught by Kessler:
The way I was trained to read literature by Milton Kessler, who was a student of Theodore Roethke, he believed in the responsiveness of the body, and of the activation of the senses to literature. And oh did I believe in that. Probably from my Italian background -- that's the way we respond to things, with our body. From Michelangelo, Bernini, there's this whole florid physicality leading right down to the Grand Opera, the great arias. [3]
In 1968, he signed an anti-war letter to The New York Review of Books . [4] His work appeared in Oregon Literary Review [5] and The Nation. [6] His fourth book, Sailing Too Far, was published by Harper & Row in 1973 and became widely noted. He also served three terms (1973-1975; 1978–1979; 1985) as director of Binghamton's creative writing program and became a full professor in 1974. Throughout his career, he held visiting professorships, fellowships and lectureships at various institutions, including Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (1971-1972), the University of Haifa (1973; 1981), the University of Hawaii (1975), Keio University (1978) and Antwerp University (1985). In addition, he was a frequent Yaddo (1965-1976; 1990; 1992) and MacDowell (1966; 1979) artist-in-residence.
Around 1970, Kessler had a brief bout with thyroid cancer, an affliction he shared with poet Paul Blackburn. Boarding a bus after a visit to Binghamton, Blackburn told Kessler, "How warm to share a common disease." Blackburn died not long after.
After Kessler's death, Binghamton University established a poetry award in his honor, the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry. [7]
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Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly known as e e cummings or E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. During World War I, he worked as an ambulance driver and was imprisoned in an internment camp, which provided the basis for his novel The Enormous Room in 1922. The following year he published his first collection of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, which showed his early experiments with grammar and typography. He wrote four plays; HIM (1927) and Santa Claus: A Morality (1946) were most successful. He wrote EIMI (1933), a travelog of the Soviet Union, and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in poetry, published as i—six nonlectures (1953). Fairy Tales (1965), a collection of short stories, was published posthumously.
Milton James Rhode Acorn, nicknamed The People's Poet by his peers, was a Canadian poet, writer, and playwright.
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–1915. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments. The work was for a wide literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought has been substantial.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a 1990 work about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia, in which she addresses major artists and writers such as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky, and Dionysus with disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth. The book became a bestseller, and was praised by numerous literary critics, although it also received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars.
John Crowe Ransom was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist. He was nominated for the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Howard Nemerov was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize.
Robert Kelly is an American poet associated with the deep image group. He was named the first Dutchess County poet laureate 2016-2017.
Paul Blackburn was an American poet. He influenced contemporary literature through his poetry, translations and the encouragement and support he offered to fellow poets.
Leslie Aaron Fiedler was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work incorporates the application of psychological theories to American literature. Fiedler's best known work is the book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as "one of the great, essential books on the American imagination ... an accepted major work." This work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalous—now increasingly accepted—judgement that American literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.
Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.
Lewis Putnam Turco was an American poet, teacher, and writer of fiction and non-fiction. Turco was an advocate for Formalist poetry in the United States.
Helen Vendler was an American academic, writer and literary critic. She was a professor of English language and history at Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities. Her academic focus was critical analysis of poetry and she studied poets from Shakespeare and George Herbert to modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney. Her technique was close reading, which she described as "reading from the point of view of a writer".
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Thomas Sayers Ellis is an American poet, photographer and bandleader. He previously taught as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Bennington College in Vermont, and also at Sarah Lawrence College until 2012.
Tina Chang is an American poet, professor, editor, organizer, and public speaker. In 2010, she was named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn.
William Kilborn Knott was an American poet.
Amanda Auchter is an American writer, professor, and editor. She is an editor and author of poetry, nonfiction essays, and book reviews.
William Daryl Hine was a Canadian poet and translator. A MacArthur Fellow for the class of 1986, Hine was the editor of Poetry from 1968 to 1978. He graduated from McGill University in 1958 and then studied in Europe, as a Canada Council scholar. He earned a PhD. in comparative literature at the University of Chicago (UChicago) in 1967. During his career, Hine taught at UChicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University.
Camille Anna Paglia is an American academic, social critic and feminist. Paglia was a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1984 until the university's closure in 2024. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.
Ruben Quesada is an American poet and critic. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He is the winner of the 2023 Barrow Street Editors Prize.
Camille Rankine is an American poet. She was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, earned a BA at Harvard University and an MFA at Columbia University.
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