Stanley Burnshaw, a publisher and literary critic who edited the works of his friend Robert Frost, died on Friday on Martha’s Vineyard in the United States. He was 99.
Burnshaw, whose literary career spanned more than seven decades, also won critical acclaim for his own poems and books.
Five of his poems were published in 1927 in The American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature. His first book, Andre Spire and His Poetry, was published in 1933, and he published his final book, a poetry anthology, in 2002.
”No one moved so widely and so well in so many avenues of literary creation and production,” Thomas F Staley, director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin, told The New York Times.
Burnshaw not only published and edited work by Frost, he also wrote a biography of him that was published in 1986.
He also famously feuded with the poet Wallace Stevens, whom he described in a review as ”a man who, having lost his footing, now scrambles to stand up and keep his balance”.
Stevens returned the favour with a poem titled Mr Burnshaw and the Statue.
Born in Manhattan to Eastern European immigrants, Burnshaw worked in advertising for a steel mill after he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1925. In 1927, he travelled to France to study before returning to the United States to earn a master’s degree from Cornell. Unable to find a teaching job, he became an editor at The New Masses, a communist weekly.
Although he was never a member of the Communist Party, he wrote a book of poems and a play that the Times called ”stridently leftist works”, as he explored ”the effects of technology distorted by greed”.
Burnshaw is survived by his wife, Susan Copen Oken, and his daughter, Valerie Razavi. — Sapa-AP