Eberhart, Richard (1904-2005), was an American poet. His Selected Poems, 1930-1965 won a 1966 Pulitzer Prize. Eberhart won the 1977 National Book Award for Collected Poems, 1930-1976.
Meditating on birth, war, disease, and death, Eberhart wrote poems that are, to use a phrase from one of them, “true originals of imagination.” As Eberhart confronted these major mysteries of human experience, the force of his feeling erupted into a series of surprise effects in his poems. These effects include mixtures of abstraction and outcry, rough meters, inverted word orders, and sudden strikingly brilliant and lyrical lines.
Eberhart was born on April 5, 1904, in Austin, Minnesota. He published his Collected Verse Plays in 1962. His prose writings were collected in Of Poetry and Poets (1979). Eberhart’s Collected Poems, 1930-1986 was published in 1988. He died on June 9, 2005, at the age of 101.
