William Harmon

Last updated

William Harmon (born 1938) is James Gordon Hanes Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of five books of poetry and editor of A Handbook to Literature. His most recent poetry has appeared in Blink and Light .

Contents

Life

William Harmon was born in Concord, North Carolina, a small cotton-mill town northeast of Charlotte. In 1954, at the age of sixteen, he entered the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1958. He was an officer on active duty with the United States Navy between 1960 and 1967, the last year of which was in Vietnam. As an adviser to the South Vietnamese Navy, he wrote its Standard Ship's Organization Manual. He continued as a Reserve officer until 1980, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. After returning to the United States, he pursued post-graduate work (focused predominantly on trans-Atlantic modernist poetry) at the University of Chicago, where he earned his master's degree in 1968; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned an additional master's the same year; and the University of Cincinnati, where he earned his doctorate in 1970. His dissertation on Ezra Pound was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1977. In 1970 he was hired by UNC Chapel Hill, where he remained on the faculty until 2008, when he retired. His first book of poetry, Treasury Holiday, was published in 1970 by Wesleyan University Press and became the Lamont Poetry Selection of the year. His most recent collection of poetry, Mutatis Mutandis: 27 Invoices, won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award in 1985.

Harmon has been donating an extensive set of correspondences (over 10,000 items, deemed the William Harmon Papers) to the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library (located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina). The letters document Harmon's discussions with a range of other poets including A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, John Hollander, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Penn Warren.

Works

Poetry

Edited Reference Works

Literary Criticism

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ezra Pound</span> American poet and critic (1885–1972)

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imagism</span> 20th-century poetry movement

Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometimes viewed as "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".

"In a Station of the Metro" is an Imagist poem by Ezra Pound published in April 1913 in the literary magazine Poetry. In the poem, Pound describes a moment in the underground metro station in Paris in 1912; he suggested that the faces of the individuals in the metro were best put into a poem not with a description but with an "equation". Because of the treatment of the subject's appearance by way of the poem's own visuality, it is considered a quintessential Imagist text.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Olson</span> American poet (1910–1970)

Charles Olson was a second generation modernist American poet who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.

James Osler Bailey was a professor of literature who taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He wrote on a wide slate of topics ranging from the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Hardy to science fiction and utopian literature.

George Moses Horton, was an African-American poet from North Carolina who was enslaved until Union troops, carrying the Emancipation Proclamation, reached North Carolina (1865). Horton is the first African-American author to be published in the United States. He is author of the first book of literature published in North Carolina and was known as the "Slave Poet".

William Procter Matthews III was an American poet and essayist.

Michael McFee is a poet and essayist from Asheville, North Carolina.

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.

William Reynolds Ferris Jr. is an American author and scholar and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. With Judy Peiser he co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Tennessee; he was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and is co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

Guy Owen was a professor of English who produced many different types of literary works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Carlyle Sitterson</span>

Joseph Carlyle "Lyle" Sitterson was an American educator who served as chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from February 16, 1966, to January 31, 1972.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Romer</span> British poet

Stephen Romer, FRSL is an English poet, academic and literary critic.

<i>A Lume Spento</i> 1908 poetry collection by Ezra Pound

A Lume Spento is a 1908 poetry collection by Ezra Pound. Self-published in Venice, it was his first collection.

<i>Cathay</i> (poetry collection) Poetry collection by Ezra Pound

Cathay (1915) is a collection of classical Chinese poetry translated into English by modernist poet Ezra Pound based on Ernest Fenollosa's notes that came into Pound's possession in 1913. At first Pound used the notes to translate Noh plays and then to translate Chinese poetry to English, despite a complete lack of knowledge of the Chinese language. The volume's 15 poems are seen less as strict translations and more as new pieces in their own right; and, in his bold translations of works from a language he was unfamiliar with, Pound set the stage for modernist translations.

C. Hugh Holman was an American literary scholar, academic administrator and detective novelist. He was a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and its Provost from 1966 to 1968. He was the vice president of the National Humanities Center. He was the author of many books about Southern literature, and the founding co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal. He was the recipient of several awards.

Blyden Jackson was a Black American academic, essayist, and activist.