Henry Hart A Brief Biography

 

            I got interested in poetry when I went to Dartmouth College in 1972 and took a Freshmen English course taught by Robert Siegel, a poet who had studied under Robert Lowell. It was Siegel’s course that made me want to be a poet. Siegel encouraged me to write poetry and introduced me to the work of a number of contemporary poets—Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, James Dickey—who became the subjects of my later books. At Dartmouth I also became a devotee of James Joyce. I was especially interested in the way myth and religion informed his aesthetics. For my honors thesis, I used some of the theories of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to analyze the heroic quest of the archetypal character HCE in Finnegans Wake. My honors supervisor encouraged me to do graduate work under Richard Ellmann at Oxford. I thought that was a good idea, but when I first spoke to Ellmann about supervising me, he politely but firmly told me that he was “tired of the Joyce industry.” He suggested I choose a different subject, so I chose Geoffrey Hill, whose aesthetic views, religious and historical preoccupations, and scrupulous craftsmanship in some ways resembled Joyce’s. While working on my D.Phil., I began publishing poetry in English literary journals.

Before I left Britain in1984, two Scottish friends—Robert Crawford and David Kinloch—who were also poets and doctoral students at Oxford, approached me about starting an international poetry journal. I gladly accepted the job of American editor and distributor of what became VERSE. Over the next decade, we published special issues on Australian poetry, Canadian poetry, Irish poetry, Caribbean poetry, New Zealand poetry, Scottish poetry, Welsh poetry, American poetry, Language poetry, and New Formalist poetry. We transformed what began as a thin journal funded by ourselves into what Seamus Heaney in 1994 called “one of the most valuable literary enterprises of our late century.”

During the past twenty-three years, I have taught literary and creative writing courses at the College of William and Mary. I have stayed particularly close to two former students, Andrew Zawacki and Brian Henry, who are now the head editors of VERSE (the Scottish editors retired in 1994, and I became managing editor). I have published three books of poetry; critical studies of Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, and Robert Lowell; and a long biography of James Dickey. I have written a novel about my ancestors who lived in China and Mongolia at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, as well as a young adult novel based on experiences I had as a teenager on a month-long canoe trip in the Allagash wilderness near Canada. (I’m still looking for publishers for the novels). I recently edited the post-WW II volume of the Wadsworth Anthology of American Literature, which is supposed to be published in 2010. I’m now completing another poetry manuscript and beginning to work on a second book about Seamus Heaney.