Robert Fitzgerald

The memoirs and essays collected in The Third Kind of Knowledge encompass the many lives of a remarkable man. Poet, translator, critic, journalist, memoirist, scholar–the late Robert Fitzgerald (1910-1985) had an unusual range of gifts and lived a strikingly varied life in the literary and academic world. While growing up, his scholarly promise earned the attention of his mentor in classical studies, Dudley Fitts, and his poetic gifts the admiration first of Vachel Lindsay and later of T. S. Eliot (who took some of his college poems for publication in the Criterion). A reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in the thirties, Fitzgerald also spent time before and after the Second World War as a part of Henry Luce’s literary stable at Time, where he forged his close friendship with James Agee and edited the Books Department for the magazine. His friendship with Agee, and also with Flannery O’Connor (whose literary executor he became) as well as with other literary figures such as John Berryman, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon flourished during this period. In the early fifties he moved with his family to Italy, where he worked for six years on his celebrated translation of the Odyssey. His other classical translations–the Illiad, the Aeneid, and his translations of Euripides and Sophocles, several done in collaboration with Dudley Fitts–have become the the signal translations of our time. A renowned teacher as well as poet and scholar, Fitzgerald taught, over the years, at such institutions as Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, The New School, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Washington. His career culminated at Harvard where, in 1965, he was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. For fifteen years his course in Versification influenced a generation of younger poets, and his seminar in “Homer, Virgil, and Dante” a generation of young scholars. The Third Kind of Knowledge displays the unusual breadth of Fitzgerald’s achievement and includes personal memoirs, reminiscences of literary friends, literary criticism of classical literature, and an interview on the art of translation. This volume has been prepared by his widow, Penelope Laurans Fitzgerald, following a plan begun by the author before his death.

Robert Fitzgerald’s work first appeared in Poetry forty years ago. Since then his controlled yet lyric voice, his intimacy with the classic tradition, have gained for him a distinguished reputation as poet and translator. In Spring Shade, he brings together all of his previous collections––Poems (1935), A Wreath for the Sea (1943), In the Rose of Time (1956)––and adds to them two dozen later poems and a generous sampling from the wide range of his translations. Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1965, Fitzgerald spends a part of each year with his family near Perugia, Italy, where he does most of his writing. He has received many honors in recent years, among them fellowship in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1962) and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963) and the first Bollingen Translation Award (1961) for his Odyssey.

Probably no other single collection of poems captures the quality of a whole civilization as well as the Greek Anthology. Also called the Palatine Anthology, it consists of more than 4,000 short poems which were written as early as 700 BC and as late as the final subsidence of Greek culture 1,000 years after Christ. Here all Greeks go hand in hand––pagan and Christian, Athenian and Byzantine, republican and imperialist, laureate and private man. The range of mood and subject, as one might expect, is as wide as human experience itself. Dudley Fitts has translated a selection of these poems into modern, readable English verse. Poet as well as classicist, Fitts has caught the precise tone––comic or elegiac, dignified or plaintive––of each Greek original, and his poems stand as firmly in English as newly created works. This volume contains 141 examples from the Greek Anthology. They were chosen, first, because among all the originals they are the ones which are most manageable within the resources of modern poetry and, second, because they represent the extraordinary diversity of theme, character, and tone in the original collection. They comprise a book of pure enjoyment which no enterprising reader will want to miss.