Winner of the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award, Richard Eberhart is one of America's most respected and acclaimed poets. Collected Poems, 1930-1986 offers a wide selection of poems from a career that has spanned over half a century, incorporating the earlier Collected Poems, 1930-1976, plus over fifty additional poems written in the last ten years. Eberhart's poetry, celebrated for its profundity and humanity, has won praise from fellow poets as various as Robert Penn Warren and Dame Edith Sitwell. This collection represents a comprehensive record of the work of a major American poet.
In his varied, century-long life, Eberhart was a tutor in the household of the king of Siam (Thailand), the vice-president of his wife's family floor wax company and poet-in-residence at Dartmouth College, N.H. But he was chiefly a poet and teacher, one of the most prominent of the group which came to notice in the years before Wold War II, publishing his first book of poetry, A Bravery of Earth, in 1930. Eberhart reached the pinnacle of his success in the 1960s and 1970s, when he won the Pulitzer Prize (1966) and the National Book Award (1977) for poetry collections.