Allen Grossman, an award-winning poet whose work bridged the Romantic and Modernist traditions, claiming nobility and power for poetry as a tool for both engaging the world and burrowing into the self, died on Friday in Chelsea, Mass. He was 82.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his son Lev, a novelist and the book critic at Time magazine.
Mr. Grossman, who was typically referred to as a poet’s poet, was also a scholar, a critic and a teacher. His poems, brainy and lyrical and often written in a voice that might be described as conversationally academic, are replete with referents, redolent of intellectual yearning and proudly high-minded, recalling Keats and Yeats, Byron and Hart Crane, Coleridge and Wallace Stevens. His subjects were large ones — love, mortality, the nature of humanity, the purpose of art in general and poetry in particular — and though his work was always serious and often self-consciously grand, he also mixed lofty rhetoric with antic humor or sly wit and wrote with personal detail about people he knew.
“Shipfitters,” for example, a poem that suggests the wondrous variety of human life and extols the virtue of knowing how to make things well, ends with the narrator envisioning his “death-ship” carrying him gloriously into the busy harbor of eternity. But it begins with a curious juxtaposition of reflections on Leonardo da Vinci and Midge Berger, his mother’s best friend:
It’s a matter of concern to me that Leonardo’s
Angels — who are so beautiful — are inadequately
provided with wings by the curious master.
Surely Leonardo knew they couldn’t arrive here
to pray, or point, or weep, or at the end
save themselves from fire, by the means depicted.
It’s also a matter of concern to me that Midge Berger,
wife of Ben Berger who owned the Mpls. Lakers,
played a good game of golf despite a tic
over her left eye (which raised her handicap)
and that Ben, a short man, liked to be photographed
next to George Mikan (7’2”), whom he hired for the purpose.
(He took a bit of poetic license with George Mikan’s height, which was actually 6-foot-10.)
Mr. Grossman’s books of poetry include “A Harlot’s Hire,” “The Woman on the Bridge Over the Chicago River,” “How to Do Things With Tears” and “Descartes’ Loneliness.” His collection “The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected” was listed in the critic Harold Bloom’s 1994 compendium of indispensable literary works, “The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.”
Mr. Grossman was the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation fellowship — the so-called genius grant — and the Bollingen Prize, given every two years by the Beinecke Library at Yale and perhaps the most prestigious award for an American poet, which he received in 2009. The judges called him “a profoundly original American poet whose work embraces the coexistence of comedy and tragedy, exploring the intersection of high poetic style and an often startling vernacular.”
One of the judges, Susan Stewart, a poet and professor of English at Princeton, said in an email that Mr. Grossman “was the most important poet-scholar of our time.”
“Whether Allen was weaving myths from his Minnesota childhood featuring his mother Beatrice and his beloved ‘Mary Snorak the Cook, Skermo the Gardener, and Jack the Parts Man,’ rewriting the history of the 19th century English steamship, praising a Chinese pot, or describing his own experience of a heart attack under the title ‘Shazam!,’ ” Ms. Stewart wrote, “his imagination returned continually to our dual existence as the creators and destroyers of our worlds.”
Allen Richard Grossman was born on Jan. 7, 1932, in Minneapolis, where his father operated a Chevrolet dealership. He earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in English from Brandeis, where he taught poetry and poetics as well as a general humanities course from 1957 until 1991. He subsequently taught at Johns Hopkins.
Mr. Grossman’s first marriage, to Meryl Mann, ended in divorce. In addition to his son Lev, he is survived by his wife, the former Judith Spink, whom he married in 1964; a brother, Burton; three other sons, Austin, Jon and Adam; a daughter, Bathsheba; six grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
In addition to poems, Mr. Grossman wrote widely on poetics and published essays on Milton, Hart Crane, Wordsworth, Walt Whitman and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, among other subjects.
“Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing,” Mr. Grossman wrote at the beginning of his best-known critical work, “The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers.” “The making of poems is a practice — a work human beings can do — in which civilization has invested some part of its love of itself and the world. The poem is a trace of the will of all persons to be known and to make known and, therefore, to be at all.”
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