Richard Eberhart

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Eberhart, Richard [Ghormley] (1904–2005), Minnesota‐born poet, educated at Dartmouth and Cambridge, has taught there and at schools and colleges, and since 1956 has been a professor of English and poet in residence at Dartmouth. His poetry assumes a variety of forms, ranging from romantic description to allegory, and is marked by intensity, honesty, and precision of diction. It includes A Bravery of Earth (1930), partly about his world tour on a freight steamer; Reading the Spirit (1937); Song and Idea (1942); Burr Oaks (1947); Brotherhood of Man (1949); An Herb Basket (1950); Undercliff (1953); Great Praises (1957); The Quarry (1964); Thirty One Sonnets (1967), written in his youth; Shifts of Being (1968); Fields of Grace (1972); Poems to Poets (1976); and Collected Poems (1976). Since then he has collected poetry in The Long Reach (1984) and other volumes, including Maine Poems (1988) and Florida Poems (1989). Collected Poems 1930–1986 was published in 1988. The Visionary Farms (1952) is one of his Collected Verse Plays (1962). He has also published Selected Prose (1978), and Of Poetry and Poets (1979). Among many honors he has received a Bollingen Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award.

Richard Eberhart , 1904–2005, American poet, b. Austin, Minn., grad. Dartmouth (1926) and Cambridge (1929, 1933). He taught at various universities before becoming a professor at Dartmouth (1956–71). His poetry, noted for its lyric simplicity and directness, has as frequent themes the loss of innocence and spontaneity and the conflict between matter and spirit. Among his several dozen volumes of poetry are A Bravery of Earth (1930), Undercliff (1953), Shifts of Being (1968), and Ways of Light (1980). His poems are collected in Selected Poems, 1930–1965 (1965; Pulitzer Prize), Collected Poems, 1930–1976 (1976), The Long Reach: New and Uncollected Poems, 1948–1984 (1984), and New and Selected Poems: 1930–1990 (1990). Eberhart's Collected Verse Plays was published in 1962. He was the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress from 1959 to 1961.

Bibliography: See biography by B. E. Engel (1971); studies by R. J. Mills, Jr. (1966), J. Roache (1971), and S. Lea and J. Parini, ed. (1980); descriptive bibliography by S. Wright (1989).