Hayden Carruth

From Philosopedia

Carruth, Hayden (3 August 1921 - 29 September 2008 )

An author who wrote poetry for over six decades, Carruth was editor of Poetry (1949—1950).

Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, the son of Gordon Vessler and Margery Tracy Barrow (Dibb) Carruth, he received his A.B. at the University of North Carolina in 1943, his M.A. in 1948 from the University of Chicago, and his LL.D. in 1987 from New England College Syracuse (New York).

Four-time married, Carruth had one child with Sara Anderson, whom he married in 1943; married Eleanore Ray in 1952; had one child when married in 1961 to Rose Marie Dorn; and married the poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin in 1989.

The Academy of American Poets has described Carruth as follows:

His first collection of poems, The Crow and the Heart, was published in 1959. Since then, he has published more than thirty books, most recently Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2006) and Doctor Jazz: Poems 1996-2000 (2001).

Other poetry titles include Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995 (1996), which received the National Book Award for Poetry; Collected Longer Poems (1994); Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 (1992), which received the National Book Critics' Circle Award; The Sleeping Beauty (1990); and Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands (1989).

Known also for his criticism, Carruth is the author of several prose collections, including Selected Essays & Reviews (Copper Canyon Press, 1996) and Sitting In: Selected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Related Topics (1993), as well as nonfiction works, including Beside the Shadblow Tree: A Memoir of James Laughlin (Copper Canyon Press, 1999) and Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays (1998).

He is also the author of a novel, Appendix A (1963), and has edited a number of anthologies, including The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (Bantam, 1970).

Informed by his political radicalism and sense of cultural responsibility, many of Carruth's best-known poems are about the people and places of northern Vermont, as well as rural poverty and hardship.

About Carruth and his work, the poet Galway Kinnell has said, "This is not a man who sits down to 'write a poem'; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being. Thoreau said, 'Be it life or death, what we crave is reality.' So it is with Carruth. And even in hell, knowledge itself bestows a halo around the consciousness with, at moments, attains it."

Carruth has received fellowships from the Bollingen Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 1995 Lannan Literary Fellowship. He has been presented with the Lenore Marshall Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Vermont Governor's Medal, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Whiting Award, and the Ruth Lilly Prize, among many others.

He has taught at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and at the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.

Having lived in Vermont for many years, Carruth now resides in Munnsville, New York, with his wife, the poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth.

In 1967 he received a grant of $10,000 from the National Foundation on Arts and Humanities.

Although he is not a member, in 2008 at the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was awarded the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize.

Asked in 1994 about humanism, Carruth responded,

• You may enroll me among the “non-theists,” if you wish. My writing contains many explanations of my position though I have never written expressly on this topic. Perhaps the best explanation is in my essay, “The Nature of Art,” Ohio Review (#49). The essay will be included in my forthcoming Selected Essays and Reviews.

Caruth died at his home in Munnsville, New York, after a series of strokes. In his New York Times obituary by William Grimes, he was described as having written "spare, precise, impassioned verse" that "took myriad forms and stamped him as one of the most wide-ranging and intellectually ambitious poets of his generation. . . . [T]ormented by a fear of people and open spaces, he spent years on the margins, living in the attic of his parent's house and working out a personal philosophy that dovetailed with European existentialists like Albert Camus, a profound influence and the subject of his book After the 'Stranger': Imaginary Dialogues With Camus (1964).

{WAS, 7 December 1994}