| William De Witt Snodgrass |
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LIFE Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg , Pennsylvania , in 1926, and was educated at Geneva College . His studies were interrupted when, during WWII, he was drafted into the Navy, and sent to the Pacific. After demobilization, Snodgrass resumed his studies, but transferred from Geneva College to the University Of Iowa , eventually enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop , which had been established in 1937, and was attracting as tutors some of the finest poetic talents of the day, among them John Berryman , Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell . CAREER Snodgrass's first poems appeared in 1951, and throughout the 1950's he published in some of the most prestigious magazines: Botteghe Oscure, Partisan Review , The New Yorker , The Paris Review and The Hudson Review . However, in 1957, five sections from a sequence entitled 'Heart's Needle' were included in Hall, Pack and Simpson's anthology, New Poets of England and America, and these were to mark a turning-point. When Lowell had been shown early versions of these poems, in 1953, he had disliked them, but now he was full of admiration. By the time Heart's Needle was published, in 1959, Snodgrass had already won the The Hudson Review Fellowship in Poetry and an , a grant from the National Institute of Arts, and, most important of all, 1960's Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. It is often said that Heart's Needle inaugurated Confessional verse. Snodgrass disliked the term. This is true, but it is also true that the genre he was reviving here seemed revolutionary to most of his contemporaries, reared as they had been on the anti-expressionistic principles of the New Critics. Snodgrass's confessional work was to have a profound effect on many of his contemporaries, amongst them, most importantly, Robert Lowell. Snodgrass has a long and distinguished academic career behind him, having taught at Cornell , Rochester, Wayne State , Syracuse, Old Dominion, and Delaware Universities . He retired from teaching in 1994, and devotes himself full-time to his writing. He lives with his fourth wife, writer Kathleen Snodgrass (née Browne). Snodgrass created a truly modern work with ''De/Compositions'' by taking 101 classic poems and reconstructing them to prove to readers exactly how important the tiniest elements in poems can be. BIBLIOGRAPHY Poetry
Prose
Anthology
Drama The Führer Bunker (1981) References
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