Education
Born in Mexico City, Mexico, Schmidt studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford University.
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(When Michael Schmidt’s last book, Lives of the Poets, was...)
When Michael Schmidt’s last book, Lives of the Poets, was published, Mark Strand called it “a tour de force, an astonishing view of the whole of poetry in English, a superb read.” Now Schmidt brings the same erudition, insight, and élan to The First Poets—the story of the ancient Greeks whose work continues to influence poetry in our own time. Poetry takes its bearings from the brilliant constellation of early and classical Greek poets, who have long been overshadowed by the great Greek dramatists. In The First Poets, Schmidt rescues the lives of these poets from their relative obscurity. Here is Orpheus, the first of the first poets, healer, mystic, and magical fixer; and Homer, about whom almost nothing is known for certain except the magnificence of his two great epic poems. Here are Linos and Arion, who survive only in legend; and Amphion, who survives through the tales we ascribe to him. Here are Sappho, the greatest Greek woman writer, and Hesiod; Hipponax, the “dirty old man of poetry”; and Theocritus, the father of the pastoral; and many others. Combining the verifiable facts of their lives and the narratives provided by later writers, Schmidt walks the fine line between fact and scholarly conjecture to create vivid, animated, wonderfully compelling portraits of these ancestors of our culture.
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Born in Mexico City, Mexico, Schmidt studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford University.
He was Professor of at Glasgow University until 2014, and from 2012 to 2015 he was Writer in Residence at Saint John"s College, Cambridge. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2006 for services to poetry. Schmidt refers to himself in his book Lives of the Poets as "an Anglophone Mexican publisher".
Schmidt"s 2014 book The Novel: A is a loosely chronological history of the development of the novel.
The book aims to explore the relationships between great novelists, including views by other novelists while avoiding literary critics who were not also writers. The Love of Strangers - Book Society Special Commendation (Century Hutchinson, 1989) Selected Poems, 1972-1997 - Book Society Special Commendation (Smith/Doorstop, 1997) Reading Modern (Routledge, London, 1989) The Story of: From Cædmon to Caxton.
From Skelton to Dryden. From Pope to Burns (three volumes) (2001–2006) The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century in English (1999, 2005) (editor) A Calendar of Modern (PN Review 100, 1994) The Great Modern Poets(inc audio excerpts) Quercus 2006.
(When Michael Schmidt’s last book, Lives of the Poets, was...)
His literary career has been described as having "a strong sense of internationalism and cultural ‘connectedness’".
