Macha Louis Rosenthal was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and editor

Editing

Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...

. The W. B. Yeats Society of New York renamed their award for achievement in Yeats studies the M. L. Rosenthal Award after Rosenthal's death. His essay, Poetry as Confession

Poetry as Confession

Poetry as Confession was an influential article written by M. L. Rosenthal, reviewing the poetry collection Life Studies by Robert Lowell. The review is credited with being the first application of the term of confession to an approach to the writing of poetry. This led to an entire movement of...

, is credited with being the first application of the term 'confession' to the writing of poetry and therefore for the naming of the confessional poetry movement.

Biography

Macha Louis Rosenthal, poet, critic, editor, and teacher, was born on March 14, 1917, in Washington, D.C. He earned his B.A. (1937) and M.A. (1938) degrees at the University of Chicago. On January 7, 1939, he married Victoria Himmelstein, with whom he had three children: David, Alan, and Laura. From 1939 to 1945, he taught as an instructor in English at Michigan State University. In 1946, he was hired as an instructor at New York University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1949. In 1961, he served in the U.S. Cultural Exchange Program and was visiting specialist to Germany; in 1965, to Pakistan; in 1966, to Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria; and in 1980, to Italy and France. In 1974, he was a visiting poet in Israel. From 1977 to 1979 he served as director of the Poetics Institute at New York University, where he was a professor of English until 1996. He was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and twice won Guggenheim Fellowships (1960–1964). He contributed poems, articles, and reviews to such leading journals as The New Yorker, the New Statesman, Poetry, The Spectator (London), ELH, and The Quarterly Review of Literature; he also served, from 1956–1961, as poetry editor of The Nation; from 1970-1978 as poetry editor of The Humanist; and from 1973-1990 as poetry editor of Present Tense. He published numerous books of criticism and collections of verse and edited various anthologies of poetry. M. L. Rosenthal died on July 21, 1996.

Essays and Reviews

• A primer of Ezra Pound (1960)
• Our Life in Poetry: Selected Essays and Reviews (1991)

External links

• Obituary at New York Times