Education
Murphy studied at Yale University under Robert Penn Warren, graduating (Bachelor) as Scholar of the House in Poetry in 1972.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Timothy Murphy
Edit ProfileCareer
He has published two collections of poetry that have been widely reviewed. However, Warren advised Murphy against an academic career, urging him instead to return to the "rich soil" of his rural roots. Murphy returned to Minnesota, and subsequently became involved in several farming and manufacturing enterprises in North Dakota, experiences which are reflected in his later writing.
Murphy published his first collection of poetry, The Deed Of Gift, in 1998.
The collection represents all of Murphy"s work as a poet through about 1996. lieutenant would be hard to confuse Murphy with any other contemporary poet.
When swift brown swallows
return to their burrows
and diamond willows
leaf in the hollows,
when barrows wallow
and brood sows farrow,
we sow the black furrows
behind our green harrows.
Achievements
-
His work has been compared to that of Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and Richard Wilbur, and Wilbur himself has described Murphy as "a mature and greatly accomplished poet." Writing of Murphy"s second collection, Very Far North, critic Stephen Burt notes, "When Murphy sounds bad, he sounds obviously bad, like bad late Frost—but his good poems are poems Frost, or Jonson, might have admired.".
