Edward Butscher

Edward Butscher’s poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals and publications, including the Saturday Review of Literature, Newsday, and the American Book Review. In 1976 he published the first biography of Sylvia Plath, and in 1988 his biography Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale won the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award.

The American Novel Is Alive and Well…Now

John Berryman: In Memorial Perspective

The Rise and Fall of James Wright

on Madness in Literature by Lillian Feder

on Alone in the Dawn: The Life of Adelaide Crapsey by Karen Alkalay-Gut

Unfinished Lives of Sylvia Plath (on Sylvia Plath: A Biography by Linda Wagner-Martin & Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson)

IN Spring/Summer 1990

Lives of the American Poet (on Marianne Moore: A Literary Life by Charles Molesworth; Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell by David Kalstone; Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life by William H. Pritchard; & Dream Song: The Life Of John Berryman by Paul Mariani)

Three Wildernesses: Pablo Picasso, Woody Allen, Anne Sexton (on A Life of Picasso: Volume I 1881-1906 by John Richardson and Marilyn McCully; Woody Allen: A Biography by Eric Lax; & Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook)

Life, Death, and American Afterlife (on Images of Afterlife: Beliefs from Antiquity to Modern Times by Geddes MacGregor; Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death by Fred Feldman; & When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture by Paul Boyer)

Science, Literature, and Their Cultural Gap (on American Literature and Science by Robert J. Scholnick; The Literature of Science: Perspectives on Popular Science Writing by Murdo William McRae; Science as Writing by David Locke; Yorick’s World: Science and the Knowing Subject by Peter Caws; & Chemistry Imagined: Reflections on Science by Roald Hoffman, Vivian Torrence)

on The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom

on Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography by Gail Levin

Landscapes of Mind and Matter (on A Vision of Nature: Traces of the Original World by Michael Tobias; Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature by Martin Warnke; & Landscape in America by George F. Thompson)

Herman Melville’s Literary Lives (on Melville and His Circle: The Last Years by William B. Dillingham; Melville: A Biography by Laurie Robertson-Lorant; and Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, 1819-1851 by Hershel Parker)

Worlds and Seas: Poets on Poetry (on The Work of Poetry by John Hollander; Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Writing and Politics by Jay Parini; and The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces 1963-1995 by Richard Wilbur)

on The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway–Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925-1947 edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli

on I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory by Patricia Hampl

The Elegant Dances of Marcel Proust and W. B. Yeats (on Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter; Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats by Brenda Maddox)

Essays of Our Time and Clime (on The Book of Twentieth-Century Essays, edited by Ian Hamilton and The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan)

A Gathering of Literary Tribes: “Small” Magazine Anthologies (on Best of Prairie Schooner: Fiction and Poetry, edited by Hilda Raz; Best of Prairie Schooner: Personal Essays, edited by Hilda Raz and Kate Flaherty; A Fine Excess: Fifty Years of The Beloit Poetry Journal, edited by Marion K. Stocking; The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review, edited by Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, and Arthur Vogelsang; and Three special issues of Poetry East [boxed set], edited by Richard Jones

Poets on Poets and Poetry (on Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr; God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable by Paul Mariani; The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration by Edward Hirsch; Desperate Measures by William Logan; and The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticism, and Occasional Prose by Josephine Jacobsen and Elizabeth Spires)

Mirrors: American Poetry Pure and Impure (on The Resistance to Poetry by James Longenbach; Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry by Carl Phillips; and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation by Jonah Raskin)

Culture and Literature: Three Collections of Letters (on A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce, edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz; The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke, edited by James H. East; and Letters 1925-1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, edited by Ursula Ludz)

Stories True and Not: Six Anthologies of Our “Best” Writing (on The Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore; The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005, edited by Laura Furman; New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best 2005, edited by Shannon Ravenel; Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses, 2005 edition, edited by Bill Henderson; The Best American Mystery Stories 2004, edited by Nelson DeMille; and The Best American Sports Writing 2004, edited by Richard Ben Kramer)

IN Fall/Winter 2006

Memoirs on Our Mind (on I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature by Lucia Perillo; Room for Doubt by Wendy Lesser; Learning to Fly: A Writer’s Memoir by Mary Lee Settle; Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree: The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors by Lisa Alther; Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir by Dinah Lenney; and Just Breathe Normally by Peggy Shumaker)

Angles and Angels of American Poetry (on Norman Finkelstein’s On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry; Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century; Brett C. Millier’s Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol; and Samuel Hazo’s The Stroke of a Pen: Essays on Poetry and Other Provocations)

Reshaping Art’s War Against Nature (on Melissa Kwasny’s Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision; Michael W. Clune’s Writing Against Time; and Ali Smith’s Artful)

on I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–1997, edited by Bill Morgan