Babette Deutsch

Babette Deutsch , 1895-1982, American poet, b. New York City. Her poems are noted for their technical virtuosity and wide range of tone and subject matter. Her best-known collections include Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (1954), Coming of Age (1959), and Collected Poems (1963 and 1969). She also wrote novels, including Mask of Silenus (1933), and numerous critical works, such as Poetry in Our Time (1954). She was married to Avrahm Yarmolinsky (1890-1975), the critic and scholar.

Deutsch, Babette (1895–1982), New York poet, noted for her sensitive intellectual verse, highly charged with emotion and concerned with social questions and attitudes. Her reputation was established by her early volumes, Banners (1919), Honey Out of the Rock (1925), and Fire for the Night (1930). Epistle to Prometheus (1931) is on the Promethean spirit throughout the ages; One Part Love (1939), a protest against the spiritual darkness of today; Take Them, Stranger (1944), poems of war; and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (1954) and Coming of Age (1959), new and selected earlier poems and translations. Collected Poems was issued in 1969. Besides novels, A Brittle Heaven (1926), In Such a Night (1927), Mask of Silenus (1933), and Rogue's Legacy (1942), she wrote a biography of Whitman (1941) for children. Critical works include Potable Gold: Some Notes on Poetry and This Age (1929); This Modern Poetry (1935), revised as Poetry in Our Time (1954); and anthologies of Russian and German poetry.