W D Snodgrass

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Snodgrass, W[illiam] D[eWitt] (1926– ),born in Pennsylvania, educated at the University of Iowa (B.A., 1949), where he also did graduate work, has taught English and speech at Syracuse and the University of Delaware (1979– ). He is known for the fine craftsmanship and deep feeling of his first collection of poems, Heart's Needle (1959, Pulitzer Prize), whose title work about a father's love for a daughter he can see only infrequently, is perhaps autobiographical but has universality in its theme of separation. Later works, also marked by formal technique and personal revelation, include After Experience (1968), incorporating translations of Rilke; Gallows Songs of Christian Morgenstern (1967); The Führer Bunker (1977), poems on the end of the Third Reich in the voices of major Nazis; Selected Poems 1957–1987 (1987); and Remains (1985), seven poems originally printed in another limited edition in 1970. Six Troubadour Songs (1977) prints translations. Each in His Season (1994) is a book of new poems organized in four parts, using both free and formal verse and ranging widely in subjects and themes: for example, In Memory of Lost Brain Cells and The Ballad of Jesse Helms, the latter a rancorous satire in 16 stanzas. The Drunken Minstrel Rags His Bluegrass Lute parodies Stevens's Man with a Blue Guitar. The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle appeared in 1995. In Radical Pursuit (1975) and To Sound Like Yourself (2003) collect literary criticism.

W. D. Snodgrass (William DeWitt Snodgrass), 1926–2009, American poet and translator, b. Wilkinsburg, Pa., grad. Univ. of Iowa, 1959. He is particularly known for his debut book, Heart's Needle (1959; Pulitzer Prize), a collection of poems about a father's love for his daughter. Snodgrass moved from early confessional poetry written in traditional styles to wider interests and freer formal treatments. His other volumes of poetry include The Remains (1970), Selected Poems: 1957–1987 (1987), The Death of Cock Robin (1989), and Each in His Season (1993). He published several translations from the German, notably of works by Christian Morgenstern; his Selected Translations was published in 1998. Snodgrass was also the author of Radical Pursuits (1974), a collection of literary critical essays. In 1977 he began The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress, imagined dialogues for Nazi public figures, completing it in 1995 with The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle. Many of his later poems and a selection of his earlier verse were published in Not for Specialists (2006). Snodgrass taught at several universities.

Bibliography: See his After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (1999) and To Sound like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (2002); W. D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy (1998); study by P. L. Gaston (1978); S. Haven, ed., The Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass (1993); P. Raisor, ed., Tuned and under Tension: The Recent Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass (1998).