Background
Belitt, Ben was born on May 2, 1911 in New York City. Son of Joseph and Ida (Lewitt) Belitt.
(First edition. Errata slip laid in. Designed and printed ...)
First edition. Errata slip laid in. Designed and printed by the Caliban Press. Dust jacket flap, pastedown, and endpaper darkened from clippings formerly laid in. The book is otherwise fine, the dust jacket is chipped at the backstrip with a few closed tears. 61 pages. cloth, dust jacket.. small 8vo..
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(This volume brings together a lifetime's achievement by o...)
This volume brings together a lifetime's achievement by one of America's outstanding poets of the twentieth century. Though his earliest poems were published more than sixty years ago, Ben Belitt's works in sum are likely to strike readers today with the force of unprecedented encounter. A poet of abundance and sometimes carnivalesque riotousness, Belitt also calls to mind the intensity and eruptiveness of Hopkins, the double passion for the infinite and the empirical exemplified by Neruda, and the lustrous word-painting associated with Keatsian Romanticism. But as these diverse predecessors suggest, Belitt is altogether an original, whose derivation is as multiple as his figuration. His concerns range from the appalled enthrallment with violence and disorder to the rage to learn how one can live in chance and confront the mandates of mortality.
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(This book of selected poems, really the best of Ben Belit...)
This book of selected poems, really the best of Ben Belitt, is a great contribution to American letters. For nearly fifty years Belitt crafted this verse as powerful, original, and challenging as any in our language. Poet, translator, scholar, and critic, Belitt has a range of tone and a command of subject that is truly extraordinary. In this volume we find diverse poems of a singular voice. Belitt is a poet of iconoclastic passions, one who is able to take personal events and transform them into magical verse sequence of words, images, and thoughts. He has always had a particular gift for turning autobiography into art, his personal geography into verse of universal meaning and poignance.
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Belitt, Ben was born on May 2, 1911 in New York City. Son of Joseph and Ida (Lewitt) Belitt.
Bachelor of Arts, University Virginia, 1932; Master of Arts, University Virginia, 1934; postgraduate, University of Virginia, 1934-1936.
Besides writing poetry, he also translated several books of poetry by Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca from Spanish to English. In 1934, and he was a doctoral student at that university from 1934 to 1936. By the early 1940s he had taken up an appointment at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Belitt was the author of eight books of poems.
His complete poems, This Scribe, My Hand, was published in 1998 by Louisiana State University Press. He wrote two books of essays and over thirteen books of translations.
He taught for many decades at Bennington College. After retiring from Bennington College, he continued to live in North Bennington and held the position of Professor Emeritus of Language and Literature at the college.
He died in Bennington on August 17, 2003, at the age of 92 and was buried in Manchester, Vermont.
His papers are held by the University of Virginia. The 1962 ballet A Look at Lightning, by the American choreographer Martha Graham, was titled after a poem by Belitt. Errand into the Maze, also by Graham, takes its title from a Belitt poem as well.
( Ben Belitt writes, "This volume―my fifth―extends and de...)
(This volume brings together a lifetime's achievement by o...)
(This book of selected poems, really the best of Ben Belit...)
(POET OF SPAIN, A DISTALLATION OF THE ESSENTIAL)
(NY 1938 1st (stated) Knopf. Poetry. 8vo., 51pp., hardcove...)
(First edition. Errata slip laid in. Designed and printed ...)
Served with Army of the United States, 1942-1944. Fellow Vermont Academy Arts and Sciences. Member P.E.N., Authors Guild, Phi Beta Kappa.