Richard Palmer Blackmur was an American literary critic and 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...

. He was born and grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts

Springfield, Massachusetts

Springfield is the most populous city in Western New England, and the seat of Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers; the western Westfield River, the eastern Chicopee River, and the eastern...

. An autodidact, Blackmur worked in a bookshop after graduating from high school, and attended lectures at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 without enrolling. He was managing editor of the literary quarterly Hound & Horn

Hound & Horn

Hound & Horn, originally subtitled "a Harvard Miscellany", was a literary quarterly founded by Harvard undergrads Lincoln Kirstein and Varian Fry in 1927...

from 1928 to 1930, at which time he resigned, although he continued to contribute to the magazine until its demise in 1934. In 1935 he published his first volume of criticism, The Double Agent; during the 1930s his criticism was influential among many modernist poets and the New Critics.

In 1940 Blackmur moved to Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, where he taught first creative writing and then English literature for the next twenty-five years. He founded and directed the university's Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, named in honor of his colleague Christian Gauss

Christian Gauss

Christian Gauss was an influential literary critic and professor of literature.-Biography:Gauss was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His father had fled Württemberg when Prussia began to dominate it in the 1860s...

. He met other influential poets while he taught at Princeton. They include W. S. Merwin and John Berryman. Merwin later published an anthology dedicated to Blackmur and Berryman, and a book of his own poetry (The Moving Target) dedicated to Blackmur.

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...

 was deliberately unkind to him when he based the snob figure of the critic Sewell on him in the novel Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift is a 1975 novel by Saul Bellow, which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year....

(1975).

External links

• Blackmur from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
• Blackmur from A Princeton Companion by Alexander Leitch (1978)
• "No Success Like Failure", a discussion of Blackmur's career from the New York Review of Books (abstract online; full text for subscribers only)

Bloom, James D. The Stock of Available Reality: R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman. (Bucknell University Press, 1984)
http://www.digitalemunction.com/2009/11/15/guest-post-henry-gould-on-unjustly-neglected-phd-monographs-and-the-american-sublime/