Lawrence Hart (1901 - 1996) was an American poet, critic, and mentor of the "Activist Group" of poets.
Hart was born in
Delta, Colorado
Delta is a home rule municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Delta County, Colorado, United States. The town population was 9,035 at the 2020 United States Census. The United States Forest Service headquarter ...
and moved to
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
in the 1920s. He married the poet
Jeanne McGahey in 1944. He died, aged 95, on 13 May 1996 in
Greenbrae, California.
The May 1951 edition of
''Poetry'' magazine was guest-edited by Hart and devoted to the work of the Activist Group, whose approach he defined as follows: "Each phrase, each unit of poetic notation, was to be written so that it would have esthetic excitement in itself, even detached from the poem."
''Poetry'' carried a half-issue "Activist Sequel" in November 1958, with a further "Note on the Activists" by Hart. In the following year, Hart stirred controversy by writing critically of the contemporary
San Francisco Renaissance.
[Hogan, William. "Between the Lines with William Hogan." ''San Francisco Chronicle'', 28 June 1959, This World 30.]
References
Further reading
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1901 births
1996 deaths
Poets from Colorado
20th-century American poets
People from Delta, Colorado
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