Stephen Burt Named Professor of English at Harvard

Cambridge, Mass. - May 5, 2010 - Stephen Burt, a published poet and prolific critic of contemporary poetry whose scholarly interests range across the verse of many nations, has been appointed professor of English at Harvard University.

Burt was previously associate professor of English at Harvard, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2007. Before that, he taught for seven years at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., serving as chair of its Department of English from 2005 to 2007.

"Professor Burt has distinguished himself internationally as an exceptional analyst and critic of modern and contemporary poetry written throughout the English-speaking world," says Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "He writes copiously and originally about American poetry, but also about the poetry of Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia; he maintains a lively interest in the poetry of Canada, Africa, and India as well. He has his ear to the ground, his eye to the Anglophone world at large, and his mind always passionately focused on new ways of thinking about poetry new and old."

Burt has published two books of his own poetry, "Popular Music" (CLP/Colorado, 1999) and "Parallel Play" (Graywolf Press, 2006), and was one of three judges for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Burt’s first scholarly book, "Randall Jarrell and His Age" (Columbia University Press, 2002), rehabilitated poet Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), praising him for his skill with an "interpersonal" poetry less sequestered from everyday life than that of many of his better-known post-World War II peers. He delineates Jarrell’s unusual respect and tenderness for his subjects, who ranged from soldiers to aging women to displaced Californians. Burt also goes beyond the poems themselves to reveal the social and political circumstances out of which they arose, demonstrating a rare gift for criticism that embeds poetry in its context without losing sight of its artistry.

Burt’s second book, "The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence" (Columbia University Press, 2007), showed that big changes in how we see the life course created new possibilities for modern poems. Reasoning that adolescence had gradually become a distinct period of life with its own desires and tastes and sufferings, Burt argues that a self-conscious poetry of adolescence has evolved into a new lyric category of manifest variety and exuberance.

Some of Burt’s most striking and profound essays were collected in a 2009 compilation, "Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry" (Graywolf Press), introducing his work to general audiences. Burt co-edited, with Hannah Brooks-Motl, "Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden" (Columbia University Press, 2005); co-authored, with David Mikics, "The Art of the Sonnet" (Harvard University Press, 2009); and is co-editor with Alfred Bendixen of the forthcoming "Cambridge History of American Poetry" (Cambridge University Press). He has also written on contemporary poets such as Rae Armantrout, C.D. Wright, and Paul Muldoon.

Burt has won fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (1999), the McKnight Foundation (2002), and the Wallace Foundation (2003). He has served as a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, PN Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books, and serves on the editorial board of the experimental New Literary History of America.

Burt graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with an A.B. in English and American literature. He spent one year as a visiting graduate student at Oxford University, and then earned his Ph.D. in English at Yale University in 2000.