Poetry:
A Bravery of Earth, 1930
Reading the Spirit, 1936
Song and Idea, 1940
A World-View, 1941
Poems, New and Selected, 1944
Burr Oaks, 1947
Brotherhood of Men, 1949
An Herb Basket, 1950
Selected Poems, 1951
Undercliff: Poems, 1946-1953, 1953
Great Praises, 1957
The Oak: A Poem, 1957
Collected Poems, 1930-1960, Including Fifty-one New Poems, 1960
The Quarry, 1964
Selected Poems, 1930-1965, 1965
Thirty-one Sonnets, 1967
Shifts of Being, 1968
Three Poems, 1968
Fields of Grace, 1972
Two Poems, 1975
Poems to Poets, 1976
Collected Poems, 1930-1976, 1976
Hour, Gnats: New Poems, 1977
Survivors, 1979
Four Poems, 1980
Ways of Light, 1980
New Hampshire: Nine Poems, 1980
Florida Poems, 1981
The Long Reach, 1984
Collected Poems, 1930-1986, 1986
Maine Poems, 1988
New and Selected Poems, 1930-1990, 1990
Drama:
The Apparition, pr. 1950
The Visionary Farms, pr. 1952
Triptych, pr. 1955
The Mad Musician, pr. 1962
Devils and Angels, pr. 1962
Collected Verse Plays, pb. 1962
The Bride from Mantua, pr. 1964
Chocorua, pb. 1981
Nonfiction:
Poetry as a Creative Principle, 1952
Of Poetry and Poets, 1979
Richard Eberhart (EHB-ur-hahrt) grew up on Burr Oaks, a forty-acre estate near Austin, Minnesota, where his father was an executive in the George A. Hormel Company. He graduated from high school with various distinctions in 1921. The following year his mother died of cancer, and his father was embezzled out of his fortune. Eberhart once said, “The violent changes in my early world subsequently drove me around the world and to Cambridge University in search of truth.” He began his college career with one year’s study at the University of Minnesota. He then attended Dartmouth College, where he received an A.B. in 1926. In 1927, he sailed around the world as a deck boy on tramp steamers; he stayed at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and received his A.B. in 1929. The next year he tutored the son of King Prajadhipok of Siam in Washington, D.C., after which he attended graduate school at Harvard in 1932. He received his M.A. from Cambridge in 1933, and from 1933 to 1941 he taught English at St. Mark’s School in Southborough, Massachusetts. He married Elizabeth Butcher in 1941; they had one son and one daughter.
Eberhart served in the Navy during World War II and was discharged as a lieutenant commander in 1946. Although such poems as “World War,” “At the End of War,” and “Brotherhood of Men” come from his war experiences, the persistence of death in his poetry undoubtedly grew from the personal tragedy of his mother’s long and painful death. Similarly, the stoical narrator of “Brotherhood of Men” who finds strength in suffering was probably as much inspired by his father as by the war; Eberhart said that his father lost his fortune but not his spirit or love of life.
After 1946, Eberhart was active both as a businessman (vice president and member of the board of directors of Butcher Polish Company) and as a lecturer and poet-in-residence at the University of Connecticut (1953), Princeton University (1955), and Dartmouth (beginning in 1956). One of the few American authors of verse plays, he founded and was the first president of the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950. In 1963, he began a three-year appointment as honorary consultant in American letters to the Library of Congress; he also served as poet laureate of New Hampshire.
Eberhart received most major awards for poetry in a career spanning seven decades. Among the most distinguished were the Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems in 1966, the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets in 1969, and the National Book Award in 1977 for Collected Poems. He also filled one of the fifty chairs of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as honorary president of the Poetry Society of America.