Background
Humphries was born in Philadelphia, Pa. in 1894, the son of John Henry Humphries, a Latin teacher and school superintendent, and Florence Yost, an English teacher.
(Excerpt from The Wind of Time: Poems The Iaded, The Late...)
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(A lovely collection of poetry by Rolfe Humphries.)
A lovely collection of poetry by Rolfe Humphries.
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Humphries was born in Philadelphia, Pa. in 1894, the son of John Henry Humphries, a Latin teacher and school superintendent, and Florence Yost, an English teacher.
His father began teaching him Latin at an early age. He was a student at Stanford University from 1912 to 1913, and he received a B. A. cum laude from Amherst College in 1915. At Amherst he heard William Butler Yeats read his poems and studied the classics with Gilbert Murray and philosophy with Alexander Meiklejohn.
During World War I he served in the army from 1917 to 1918, rising to the rank of first lieutenant.
Humphries taught and coached athletics at the Potter School for Boys in San Francisco (1914 - 1923) and the Browning School for Boys in New York City (1923 - 1924) and taught Latin at Woodmere Academy on Long Island, N. Y. (1925 - 1957). He was a professor of Latin at Hunter College in 1957 and a lecturer in English at Amherst College from 1957 to 1965. He also taught briefly at the University of Washington in 1966. He served on the faculties of summer writers' conferences at the University of New Hampshire, Indiana University, the University of Colorado, the University of Utah, and Portland State University.
He won the Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry in 1947, the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1951 and 1956, and the Winterfest Poetry Award in 1966. Humphries published several volumes of poetry: Europa, and Other Poems and Sonnets (1929), Out of the Jewel (1942), The Summer Landscape (1944), Forbid Thy Ravens (1947), The Wind of Time (1950), Poems, Collected and New (1954), Green Armour on Green Ground (1956), Collected Poems of Rolfe Humphries (1956), and Coat on a Stick: Late Poems (1969). Humphries' poems are exuberant. Sometimes rhymed and sometimes not, they speak of nature, passion, sports, travel, and everyday scenes. Some of them are of the essence, others trivial. Always the poems are laced with humor and frequently with classical references.
Although Humphries was usually described as a minor poet, his poems were generally well received, if with reservations about his flamboyant language and contemporary usages. A reviewer of Europa complained that the poet failed "to distinguish between the stable diction of art and the smart words and topics which current sophistication employs. " Nearly forty years later, a reviewer of Collected Poems of Rolfe Humphries described Humphries as "a lion-tamer who will stoop, through sheer exuberance of craft, to train a flea. " Humphries translated the writings of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Among them were Poet in New York (1940), Gypsy Ballads (1953), and Five Plays: Comedies and Tragicomedies (1963). Humphries also edited New Poems by American Poets (1953; 2nd ed. , 1957) and Nine Thorny Thickets: Selected Poems of Dafydd Ap Gwilyn (1970). Perhaps as notable as his poetry was Humphries' work as a translator of classical literature. Combining his early training in the ancient languages with his poetic skills, he provided able translations of Virgil's Aeneid (1951), Ovid's Metamorphoses (1955), Juvenal's Satires (1958), Ovid's Art of Love (1958), Martial's Selected Epigrams (1963), and Lucretius' The Way Things Are (1968). Humphries died in Redwood City, Calif.
(Excerpt from The Wind of Time: Poems The Iaded, The Late...)
(A lovely collection of poetry by Rolfe Humphries.)
Like many American intellectuals, Humphries supported the Republican (left-wing) side in the Spanish Civil War.
Humphries was a Guggenheim Fellow in creative writing in 1938-1939, a period he spent traveling in Mexico and Europe. He was a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1955.
On June 26, 1925, he married Helen Ward Spencer; they had one child, a son who predeceased them.