Reed Whittemore, former poet laureate, dies at 92

Reed Whittemore, who as a Yale sophomore in 1939 helped start a literary magazine that published some of the eminent poets of the age and who himself became a leading ambassador for poetry as writer, editor, college professor and twice poet laureate of the United States, died April 6 in Kensington. He was 92.

The death, at the Arden Courts assisted living facility, was confirmed by his daughter Cate Whittemore. She said her father had dementia and also was diagnosed more than 45 years ago with myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disorder that made it hard to raise his arms, make a fist and even walk.

(The Washington Post) - Reed Whittemore twice served as the poetry consultant for the Library of Congress — a position now called U.S. poet laureate. He was a professor at Carleton College and the University of Maryland.

Mr. Whittemore took the steroid prednisone as a treatment for the disease, but found the side effects made him feel moody. Invoking his New England WASP pedigree, he once quipped, “One can easily see a connection between the last Puritans and myasthenia.”

This whimsical view of his illness was in keeping with the ironic playfulness of his poems. Mr. Whittemore delicately balanced the lyrical and conversational in much-anthologized poems exploring marriage and fatherhood, capitalism and bureaucracy and the meaning of a poet in society. He also was a well-regarded essayist of broad tastes — from Robert Browning to the Beats.

Don Share, the senior editor of Poetry magazine, said Mr. Whittemore had a “wide-ranging literary presence” for more than a half-century. Share called Mr. Whittemore a strong advocate for “poetry as part of public conversation, poems that engaged the way people talked and thought about politics.”

His poem “On the Unimportance of Words,” published in Poetry in 1954, satirizes through its blindly boosterish tone American consumerism and social behavior:

Gentlemen,

Accept my word that this country is wiser and better

Than its words. It would be unpatriotic to think otherwise.

Of course we are not perfect.

...

Things are admittedly tough, and I would not have you

Student-voter-consumer Americans think

Otherwise.

But when you have added it up — the lies and the come-ons,

And the jargon and the platitudes and hosannas — when

you have granted

That verbally we are blockheads and cheats and worse

I ask you,

What does this matter so long as we keep the faith,

And our hearts are true and our minds clean, and we grow

More and bigger forever (and onward and upward)?

Few had a more precocious start than Mr. Whittemore. At 20, he co-founded the literary quarterly Furioso and used his persistence to lure contributions from established Modernist poets including Archibald Macleish, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams. Many were drawn to the enterprise by the fact that they had gotten their start in such “little magazines.”

“The name Furioso is a knockout,” Williams wrote back. “Nothing could be more to the point. If youth ain’t furioso at the . . . spectacle the world presents today with all its backhouses propped up on the official stilts — then it ain’t worth a damn. Start furioso. You’ll be geniuses if you can bring it out.”