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Poems
Collected Poems

 


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Edgar Bowers was born in 1924 in Rome, Georgia. His schooling was interrupted by the second world war in which he served in the Counter Intelligence Corps assigned to the 101st Airborne division and then in Berchtesgaden, Germany. On his discharge in April, 1946, he returned to the University of North Carolina, finishing his graduate studies with a Phd in English at Stanford University. He has taught at Duke University, Harpur College, and finally at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, from 1958 to his retirement in 1991. Among his many awards were two Guggenheim fellowships (1959, 1969) and the Bolligen Prize for Poetry (1989).

Photo: Gay Block


"Edgar Bowers has been one of the best living American poets these last forty years. His Collected Poems now testifies to his authentic eminence: in vital form, in accuracy of perception and sensation, in a vision at once original yet profoundly representative of the American imagination at its most eloquent maturity." -- Harold Bloom

"There's a great cumulative power to this collection. Bowers started with youthful stoicism, but the feeling is now governed by an increasing acceptance of the physical world, indeed not breaking with its stoic past, but occasionally extending to a positive joy. The past now serves a present alert with possibilities." -- Thom Gunn