Tonight from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com my guest will be the esteemed poet and translator David Ferry, 87, this year's winner of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, publishers of Poetry magazine (founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912).
Ferry grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, attended Amherst College and served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. He began writing poems as a graduate student at Harvard and soon began doing translations -- "taking assignments," as he put it to me -- as well. A teacher at Wellesley College from 1952, he continues to teach regularly at Boston and Suffolk universities and continues his busy schedule of writing and translating. Having tackled the Odes and Epistles of Horace, and the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, he is now in the midst of a new translation of Virgil's Aeneid. As a critic he authored major contributions on Wordsworth and his own poems are deeply conscious of the American language and poetic tradition. They are published by The University of Chicago Press. He was married for almost 50 years to the late Anne Ferry, a distinguished literary critic and teacher.
The program will then be posted at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming indefinitely.
See you on the radio!
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