Ryan James Wilson (born December 14, 1982) is an American poet, editor, translator, literary critic, and academic from Baltimore, Maryland. He is the C.F.O. and Office Manager of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, editor of Literary Matters, and an award-winning poet, essayist, and literary translator. His first collection of poetry, The Stranger World, was published in June 2017. In 2019, his monograph, How to Think Like a Poet, was published by Wiseblood Books, and in 2021 his Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020 was published by Franciscan University Press. Ryan Wilson received an Honorable Mention for his poem For a Dog in the Rob Frost Farm Poetry contest in 2015.
His first collection of poetry, The Stranger World, won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was published by Measure Press in June 2017. Mark Jarman said, "The Stranger World includes heartbreaking lyrics, haunting narratives, inspired translations, and finely honed satires. It is not simply consummate skill that is everywhere present in these well-wrought poems but, to echo the title of one of the best of them, authority. They are written with the authority of mastery."[2] Robert Pinsky wrote, "Ryan Wilson’s mastery of traditional forms serves a fresh, distinctive poetry of candor and meditation: soulful rather than brittle, more observant than performative. The idiomatic, American blank verse of Wilson’s 'Authority' and L’Estraneo is as fluent as that of Robert Frost, but with an oblique tenderness that reminds me of Frost’s friend Edward Thomas."
In 2019, Wiseblood Books published Wilson's monograph, How to Think Like a Poet, which was previously awarded the Jacques Maritain Prize for Non-Fiction by the journal, Dappled Things. George David Clark, editor of 32 Poems, wrote of the monograph: “With an uncommon clarity and a uniquely graceful erudition, Ryan Wilson challenges us to think faithfully about our art and artfully about our faith. Candid, eloquent, insightful, and, above all, passionately hospitable, How to Think Like a Poet invites us into poetic relationships, exchanges in which our minds creatively host the stranger-world while simultaneously enjoying that world’s lavish generosities. Ultimately, these pages offer nothing less than the radical welcome of the authentically Christian imagination.” Rachel Hadas added, “At once heartening and challenging, hortatory and inspiring, Wilson’s homiletic essay is a gentle but powerful companion on any poet’s path.”
In December 2021, Franciscan University Press published Wilson's Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020. Of this book, A.E. Stallings has written: “This anthology of lyric poems and passages of epic, from antiquity to the 20th century, from Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, represents a sweeping literary education unto itself.” Fred Chappell noted, “These translations are respectful but not staid, accurate but not persnickety, renewing but not distorting,” and David Ferry added, “Wilson’s choices are always responsible and responsive, as manifested in the elegant music of his versification.” Former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Rosanna Warren, wrote: “One feels a lifetime of poetic art bound between the covers of this book. Both Ryan Wilson’s lifetime—years of dedicated, disciplined, and devoted skill went into making this varying music for so many different voices—and the larger lifetime of the poetry of the West, the Classical tradition from Homer, Alcman, and Sappho to Trakl and Georg Heym. The elegance of Wilson’s verse is breathtaking: Horatian, really—alacrity, subtlety, wit, naturalness. This book is a civilization. May it enlighten and delight many.”
Awards
Sankey Prize for Excellence in Poetry (Johns Hopkins University).
Shmuel Traum Prize (Boston University).
Eleanor Clark Award (Robert Penn Warren Circle), winner.
Jacques Maritain Prize (Dappled Things), winner, 2015.
Walter Sullivan Prize for Promise in Criticism (The Sewanee Review), winner, 2016.
Donald Justice Poetry Prize, winner, 2017.
Further reading
"Wilson, Ryan". Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Retrieved July 20, 2017. – Beltway Poetry Quarterly showcases the literary community in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding Mid-Atlantic region.
Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets, along with his friend Anthony Hecht, of the World War II generation, Wilbur's work, often employing rhyme, and composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was acclaimed in his youth as the heir to Robert Frost, translated the verse dramas of Moliere, Corneille, and Racine into rhymed English, collaborated with Leonard Bernstein as the lyricist for the opera Candide, and in his old age acted, particularly through his role in the annual West Chester University Poetry Conference, as a mentor to the younger poets of the New Formalist movement. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.
John Orley Allen Tate, known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944. Among his best known works are the poems "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1928) and "The Mediterranean" (1933), and his only novel The Fathers (1938). He is associated with New Criticism, the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians.
John Thomas Irwin was an American poet and literary critic. He was the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Professor in The Writing Seminars and the English Department at Johns Hopkins University.
Anthony Evan Hecht was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work.
Richard Tillinghast is an American poet and author.
Daniel Gerard Hoffman was an American poet, essayist, and academic. He was appointed the twenty-second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1973.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
— W. H. Auden, from "September 1, 1939"
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Ernest Hilbert is an American poet, critic, opera librettist, and editor.
Hyam Plutzik was an American poet and educator and is best known for Horatio, a long narrative poem that illustrates the illusiveness of memory through a search for the true identity of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Three of Plutzik’s poetry books, including Horatio, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and his work continues to garner praise from leading scholars and critics. Since Plutzik’s death, several new books related to his life and work have been published, with Forewords written by noted poets and scholars, including Anthony Hecht (1987), David Scott Kastan (2012), Daniel Halpern (2017), Richard Blanco (2021), and Edward Hirsch (2023). In May 2012, The Paris Review published a feature article on Plutzik: “A Great Stag – Broad Antlered: Rediscovering Hyam Plutzik.”
Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, biographer, and children's book author. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut. She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. From 1978 to 1994, she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She is the author or translator of more than twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and children. While most of her work deals with historical subjects, in 2014 she published a memoir, named one of NPR's Best Books of 2014, entitled How I Discovered Poetry.
Christian Wiman is an American poet, translator and editor.
Ned Balbo is an American poet, translator, and essayist.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Major poetry-related events that took place worldwide during 2018 are outlined below, in various different sections. This includes poetry books released during the year in different languages, major literary awards, poetry festivals and events, besides anniversaries and deaths of renowned poets, etc. Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
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.
