Richard Palmer Blackmur (January 21, 1904 – February 2, 1965) was an American
literary critic and
poet.
Life
Blackmur was born and grew up in
Springfield, Massachusetts.
He attended
Cambridge High and Latin School, but was expelled in 1918.[1]
An
autodidact, Blackmur worked in a bookshop after high school, and attended lectures at
Harvard University without enrolling. He was managing editor of the literary quarterly Hound & Horn from 1928 to 1930, at which time he resigned, although he continued to contribute to the magazine until its demise in 1934.
In 1930 he married Helen Dickson.[2]
In 1935 he published his first volume of criticism, The Double Agent; during the 1930s his criticism was influential among many
modernist poets and the
New Critics.[3]
In 1940 Blackmur moved to
Princeton University, where he taught first creative writing and then English literature for the next twenty-five years. In 1947, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship.[4]
He founded and directed the university's Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, named in honor of his colleague
Christian Gauss. He met other influential poets while he taught at Princeton. They include
W. S. Merwin and
John Berryman. Merwin later published an anthology dedicated to Blackmur and Berryman, and a book of his own poetry (The Moving Target) dedicated to Blackmur.
He taught at
Cambridge University in 1961—62.[5]