I lived from 1901-1987.
I was from the USA, and am in the Americas category.
Robert Francis, born in Upland, Pennsylvania in 1901. He was educated at Harvard University. After graduating, he moved into a small house in Amherst, Massachusetts that he named "Fort Juniper", inspiring editors at the University of Massachusetts Press to name their poetry award the Juniper Prize. His autobiography, The Trouble with Francis (1971), recounts in alarming detail the construction of this retreat, even including a ledger of materials and their cost down to the last nail, as though the poet were driven to prove his frugality.
Read full description by GypsyDreamer, OldPoetry Team...
In The Satirical Rogue On Poetry, his curious collection of witticisms, criticisms and aphorisms, Francis included a short essay called "Poetry and Poverty." Here he cited the poet, Robert Herrick, whose cottage garden provided sufficiency for a modest board: "Or pea, or bean, or wort, or beet, Whatever comes, content makes sweet." From his own experience Francis proposed that "a young poet just out of college and not yet married might consider a Herrick sort of life for a few years. Like Herrick he could grow the pea, the bean, the wort, the beet, and like Herrick, he could keep a hen. Rough clothes, old clothes, would be fine. A good half the day or half the year he could have clear for himself and his poetry. Even if he didn’t wholly like such a life, it might be better than going hungry in New York or Paris. He could always move to the city whenever his income permitted…. He might, of course, like it. He might decide to stay on. Healthy, solvent, and independent, he might find cottage life good for him, and being good for him, good for his poetry as well." He was sixty-seven when Satirical Rogue appeared in 1968. He lived another nineteen years, long enough to see his collected poems in print, and to produce a final slender volume, Late Fire, Late Snow, which contains several of his finest lyrics.
During his writing career, Francis served as Phi Beta Kappa poet at both Tufts and Harvard. A world traveler, he often journeyed to Europe, at one time teaching at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon.
Francis' poems are widely varied in form and subject, though a kind tone permeates much of his work. His first collection of poetry, Stand with Me Here (1936) was followed by nine other volumes, including The Orb Weaver (Wesleyan University Press). His complete poetic texts can be found in Collected Poems: 1936-1976 (1976). Prolific in many genres, Francis also produced a novel, We Fly Away (1948), and essays. In 1957, he received the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Robert Francis died in July, 1987
Bibliography source: dlxs.org
Popular poetry
Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand,
11 lines, 1 comment
Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
18 lines, 3 comments
The winter apples have been picked, the garden turned.
Rain and wind have picked the maple leaves and gone.
12 lines
Winter uses all the blues there are.
One shade of blue for water, one for ice,
9 lines, 1 comment
The beautiful is fair. The just is fair.
Yet one is commonplace and one is rare,
7 lines
backroad leafmold stonewall chipmunk
underbrush grapevine woodchuck shadblow
12 lines
From where I stand the sheep stand still
As stones against the stony hill.
10 lines
A seated statue of himself he seems.
A bronze slowness becomes him. Patently
12 lines
The first speaker said
Fear fire. Fear furnaces
19 lines
Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berry bush
12 lines
Start a forum topic about this poet
|
