THE sheer longevity of Richard Eberhart, who has died aged 101, was bound to make him something of a grand old man of American letters. He laboured long and with great devotion not only in verse, but in poetic drama.
He regarded himself as being in a line of Romantic practitioners stretching from Blake, through Wordsworth to Walt Whitman. As the disparate characteristics of the poets on that list suggest, his copious output was somewhat uneven. And that unevenness could extend to different parts of a single poem.
But, as the critic Martin Seymour-Smith said of him, in praising the moving final lines of the oft-anthologised The Fury of Aerial Bombardment: “The long quarry into the vague, always sweet mud of his poetry yields similar jewels, and is worthwhile.”
Richard Ghormley Eberhart was born in Austin, Minnesota, and grew up on the family estate. He went for a year to the University of Minnesota, but although his father had just lost most of his fortune, money was found for him to transfer to the Ivy League Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
After graduating in English in 1926 he took passage in a tramp steamer, ending up in England where he took another degree at Cambridge. Returning to America in 1929, he was successively basement floorwalker in a Chicago store, slaughterhouse worker in New York, tutor to the Procter girls (of Procter & Gamble) and to the son of King Prajadhipok of Siam, who was in America for eye surgery.
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His first volume, the single long poem A Bravery of Earth, appeared in London in 1930 and in New York the following year. A voyage of sensory, intellectual and imaginative exploration from fevered youth to calmly sentient maturity, it contained the germ of his lifelong preoccupations. This revelling in the texture of physical and mental life, and a concomitant dread of the idea of death, was amplified in successor volumes: Reading the Spirit (1937) and Song and Idea (1940).
Eberhart spent the years 1942-46 serving in the United States Naval Reserve. Poems New and Selected (1944) appeared in that time.
After the war Eberhart worked for six years at the Butcher Polish Company, owned by his wife’s family. Thereafter he held visiting professorships at various universities, including Washington (Seattle), Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, where he was Professor of English and Poet in Residence, 1956-68. From 1968 he was Poet in Residence at Dartmouth College.
Verse collections appeared at regular intervals, consolidating his earlier reputation, and he wrote half a dozen plays. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for Selected Poems 1930-65, and a National Book Award in 1977 for Collected Poems, 1930-76.
His wife Helen died in 1993. He is survived by a daughter and a son.
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Richard Eberhart, poet, was born on April 5, 1904. He died on June 14, 2005, aged 101.