Leonard Bacon was an American poet, translator, and educator. He is known as the author of the Pulitzer prizewinning satiric poetry collection Sunderland Capture.
Background
Ethnicity:
Leonard Bacon was descended from a long line of Puritan clergymen living in the Connecticut River valley.
Leonard Bacon was born on May 26, 1887, in Solvay, New York, United States. He was the son of Nathaniel Terry Bacon, a chemical engineer, and Helen Bacon (maiden name Hazard).
Education
Shortly after Leonard Bacon's birth, the family moved to Peace Dale, Rhode Island, and lived on his mother's family estate.
Bacon's father, a successful chemical engineer and investor, was strict. He variously interested himself in economics, languages, history, and a number of shrewd investments in rubber, cotton, railroads, and other businesses.
On the other hand, Bacon gave his mother credit for directing his attentions toward literature, and particularly poetry, at an early age. Shy in his youth, he had difficulty adapting socially because of his extravagant height and athletic ineptitude when he was sent to St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island at the age of eleven.
When it came time for college, there was little doubt where Bacon would enroll. Not only had a large number of his relatives attended Yale University, but several of his uncles and cousins were also among the faculty when he left for the institution in 1905.
Once at Yale, Bacon began to blossom under the tutelage of Professor Chauncey B. Tinker, who introduced the youth to English and classical literature. While there, Bacon served on the staff of the school's literary magazine at the same time as author Sinclair Lewis.
In 1906 Bacon had a nervous breakdown and his parents sent him to a Swiss asylum in the Alps near Montreux, where he was introduced to modern writers such as William Butler Yeats and members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of British artists. Inspired, Leonard Bacon penned his first published poem, "The Ballad of Blonay; A Chanson de Iolande." Bacon returned to Yale and became co-editor of the literary magazine.
After graduation from Yale University, Leonard Bacon came up with enough money to publish a volume of his own poems, which he titled The Scrannel Pipe. After another bout with depression, Bacon convalesced by working on a ranch in Montana and then briefly went to Alabama to work on a cotton plantation owned by his father as a business manager and work-gang foreman. In 1910, he was invited to teach at the English department of the University of California, Berkeley. Bacon found the quiet atmosphere of small-town Berkeley ideal.
After translating and publishing a number of works, including Chanson de Roland, Heroic Ballads of Servia (with George Noyes), and The Cid (with Selden Rose), he enlisted in the United States armed forces in 1917. He attended flying school in Toronto and was commissioned second lieutenant in the aviation section of the Signal Reserve Corps, but he had desk jobs in Washington, D. C., and San Diego, California, before being sent (at his request) to radio school at Columbia University. Bacon returned to Berkeley in January 1919 but was no longer satisfied with teaching.
He published a verse satire, "Banquet of the Poets" in 1920 that gained national attention. Three years later, he retired permanently from teaching concentrated on his writing, including poetry, reviews, and occasional essays.
Already a friend of Canby and William Rose Benét of the Saturday Review of Literature, Bacon began regularly publishing his poems in the magazine under the pseudonym Autolycus. His progress was not easy. He became acutely depressed again in 1923 when he moved to Carmel, California, and after publication of Ph. D's in 1925, a volume of satiric verse, he went to Zurich to consult with Carl Jung. Bacon's next book, Animula Vagula, was the record, he said, of this "saison en enfer."
Also at this time Bacon began research on Gabriele D'Annunzio. In the spring of 1927 he decided to move to Europe with his family. After settling in Florence, Bacon devoted his energies to The Furioso, his D'Annunzio mock epic and perhaps his finest work.
In 1932, the author returned to the United States, living alternately in Santa Barbara and Peace Dale. He published his poems regularly in Atlantic, Harper's, New Yorker, and Saturday Review and wrote frequent reviews for the last of these magazines.
Although Leonard Bacon never attracted a large following of readers, he did pen several works that won him critical praise, particularly Sunderland Capture. Semi-Centennial, an autobiography, also earned him critical approval.
At the end of his life, in 1951, Leonard Bacon was honored for his years of work when elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a member of Alpha Delta Phi.
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1951
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"His contribution was perhaps slight, yet his work remains an eloquent expression of the fierce Puritan intellectual tradition, in which ideals of learning and faith were bound together." Dean Flower
Connections
Leonard Bacon married Martha Sherman Stringham, the daughter of a mathematics professor, Irving Stringham, on May 16, 1912. The family produced three children named Martha Sherman, Helen Hazard, and Alice.