Voices in the Cave of Being

 

Donald E. Stanford [right] (1913–1998), scholar and poet, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and grew up in New England and California. He obtained degrees from Harvard and Stanford, where he was a student and friend of Yvor Winters, and taught at various institutions, but principally, after the war, at Lousiana State University. He edited the standard edition of Edward Taylor’s poems, did major work on Robert Bridges, and engaged in his most significant thinking about poetic modes in Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry (Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Robinson, Winters). In 1965 he and Lewis P. Simpson revived the prestigious Southern Review (founded in 1935 by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks), which he co-edited until his retirement in 1983. His Complete Poems, largely from the 1930s and 40s, appeared in 2002. Among his awards and honors was a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Taylor. He was married to Maryanna Peterson.

John Fraser [left] was born in London in 1928, came to North America in 1953, and has degrees in English from Oxford and the University of Minnesota, where he did a minor in philosophy. From 1961 to 1993 he taught at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, offering for a number of years a seminar on “Traditionalism and Experimentation in Poetry, 1880–1920,” and in 1990 gave the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto on “Nihilism, Modernism, and Value.” He was married to the artist Carol Hoorn Fraser (1930–1991), with whom he spent time in Provence and Mexico. His three print books were published by Cambridge University Press, with the equivalent of several more on his website. His articles include “20th-Century American and British Poetics,” in the 1965 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. A selection of his photographs can be found in “Visuals.”