English professor awarded NEH fellowship

Professor of English Timothy Materer has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for 2004-05. His research leave will be devoted to writing a book on the poets Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill and research in their papers at Washington University and Vassar College. His project grows out of his book James Merrill's Apocalypse (Cornell University Press, 2000), which acquainted him with the close friendship and collaboration of the two poets. Materer's proposed book, Dual Lives, will follow the parallel development of Bishop's and Merrill's careers through their poetry and many unpublished letters and writings.

From the time the poets met in 1948, each thought of the other as showing the way to live a poet's life. Both poets struggled with expressing the relationship of their sexuality to their poetic identity, and each used the metaphor of "inversion" to create their sense of what Bishop called "a world inverted" by the imagination. Bishop and Merrill discovered how to remain true to the complexity of experience and human identity while still, in Merrill's words about Bishop, creating in their poetry a "purified, transparent 'I,' which readers may take as their virtual own."

Additional links:

Timothy Materer
English Department

National Endowment for the Humanities

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