Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...

, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is ''Piece by Piece: Selected Prose'' (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is ''Love and Dread'' (Measure Press Inc., 2021). Her honors include a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

Ingram Merrill Foundation The Ingram Merrill Foundation was a private foundation established in the mid-1950s by poet James Merrill (1926-1995), using funds from his substantial family inheritance.J. D. McClatchyBraving the Elements ''The New Yorker'', 27 March 1995. Retriev ...

Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the

Folger Shakespeare Library The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare material ...

, and an Award in Literature from the

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqua ...

Biography

The daughter of noted

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

classicist

Moses Hadas Moses Hadas (June 25, 1900, Atlanta, Georgia – August 17, 1966) was an American teacher, a classical scholar, and a translator of numerous works from Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and German. Life Raised in Atlanta in a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Je ...

and

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

teacher Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas, Hadas grew up in

Morningside Heights Morningside Heights is a neighborhood on the West Side of Upper Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded by Morningside Drive to the east, 125th Street to the north, 110th Street to the south, and Riverside Drive to the west. Morningside ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. She received a

baccalaureate Baccalaureate may refer to: * ''Baccalauréat'', a French national academic qualification * Bachelor's degree, or baccalaureate, an undergraduate academic degree * English Baccalaureate, a performance measure to assess secondary schools in England ...

Radcliffe College Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and he ...

classics Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics ...

, a

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...

(1977) at

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

, and a

doctorate A doctorate (from Latin ''docere'', "to teach"), doctor's degree (from Latin ''doctor'', "teacher"), or doctoral degree is an academic degree awarded by universities and some other educational institutions, derived from the ancient formalism ''l ...

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

comparative literature Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role similar to that of the study ...

(1982). Marrying a man from the island of Samos and living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poets

James Merrill James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for ''Divine Comedies.'' His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyri ...

and Alan Ansen, both of whom strongly influenced her early work, as did

Cavafy Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis ( el, Κωνσταντίνος Πέτρου Καβάφης ; April 29 (April 17, OS), 1863 – April 29, 1933), known, especially in English, as Constantine P. Cavafy and often published as C. P. Cavafy (), was a Gree ...

, whose work she translated, and

Seferis Giorgos or George Seferis (; gr, Γιώργος Σεφέρης ), the pen name of Georgios Seferiades (Γεώργιος Σεφεριάδης; March 13 – September 20, 1971), was a Greek poet and diplomat. He was one of the most important G ...

. She is often associated with the

New Formalism New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels an ...

school of poetry, and her work was included in landmark collections of New Formalism including '' Rebel Angels'' and ''A Formal Feeling Comes''. Her subject matter ranges from her roots in the classics through the intimately personal, with memory a recurring theme throughout her work. During the height of the

AIDS Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual m ...

crisis, she led poetry workshops for those afflicted, and edited a number of their works with Charles Barber, experiences that informed her subsequent work. Her translations of writers including

Tibullus Albius Tibullus ( BC19 BC) was a Latin poet and writer of elegies. His first and second books of poetry are extant; many other texts attributed to him are of questionable origins. Little is known about the life of Tibullus. There are only a fe ...

Charles Baudelaire Charles Pierre Baudelaire (, ; ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poetry, French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticis ...

, and the Greek poet

Konstantinos Karyotakis Konstantinos or Constantinos (Κωνσταντίνος, ''Konstantínos'') is a Greek male given name. * Konstantinos (born 1972), occultist * Konstantinos "Kosta" Barbarouses (born 1990), New Zealand footballer * Konstantinos Chalkias (born 1 ...

, have been published to much acclaim. She has taught English at the Newark campus of

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

since 1981, where, as of 2006, she is the Board of Governors Professor of English. Hadas will be teaching at the Poetry Seminar at

The Frost Place The Frost Place is a museum and nonprofit educational center for poetry located at Robert Frost's former home on Ridge Road in Franconia, New Hampshire, United States. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. ...

in August, 2021. Hadas lives in New York City and Vermont and is married to the visual artist

Shalom Gorewitz Shalom Gorewitz (born 1949) is an American visual artist. Gorewitz was among the first generation of artists who used early video technology as an expressive medium. Since the late 1960s, he has created videos that "transform recorded reality th ...

. She was married to composer George Edwards until his death in 2011. Hadas has a son, Jonathan Hadas Edwards (born 1984).

Bibliography

Poetry

;Broadsides * ;Collections * ''Questions in the Vestibule: Poems'',

Northwestern University Press Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas of continental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticism ...

, 2016, * * ''The Ache of Appetite'', Copper Beech Press, 2010, * ''River of Forgetfulness'', David Robert Books, 2006, ; ( WordTech Communications, 2006) * ''Laws'',

University of Nebraska Press The University of Nebraska Press, also known as UNP, was founded in 1941 and is an academic publisher of scholarly and general-interest books. The press is under the auspices of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the main campus of the Univer ...

, 2004), * * * * ''The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths'' (

Faber & Faber Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel B ...

, 1995) * * ''Mirrors of Astonishment'' (

Rutgers University Press Rutgers University Press (RUP) is a nonprofit academic publishing house, operating in New Brunswick, New Jersey under the auspices of Rutgers University. History Rutgers University Press, a nonprofit academic publishing house operating in New B ...

, 1992) * ''Living in Time'' (Rutgers University Press, 1990) * ''Pass It On'',

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial su ...

, 1989, * * ''Slow Transparency'' (Wesleyan University Press, 1983) ;Chapbooks * ''Starting from Troy'' (

David R. Godine Godine is a New England based independent book publisher, known for its beautifully published and carefully selected books, primarily nonfiction, literary fiction, and poetry. History The company was founded in 1970 by David R. Godine who acted a ...

, 1975) * "Two Poems" ( Dim Gray Bar Press, 2000) ;Translations * ''Other Worlds Than This'' (Rutger University Press, 1994) ;Anthologies edited * ''The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present'' (

W.W. Norton W. W. Norton & Company is an American publishing company based in New York City. Established in 1923, it has been owned wholly by its employees since the early 1960s. The company is known for its Norton Anthologies (particularly ''The Norton Ant ...

, 2010; Eds., Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, Karen Van Dyck) * ''Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop'' (Ed. with Charles Barber,

, 1991) ;List of poems

Essay collections

* ''Classics: Essays'' (Textos Books, 2007) * ''Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dreams'' (

University of Michigan Press The University of Michigan Press is part of Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan Library. It publishes 170 new titles each year in the humanities and social sciences. Titles from the press have earned numerous awards, including L ...

, 2000) *

Memoirs

References

Sources

Library of Congress Online Catalog > Rachel Hadas

External links

RachelHadas.com Author Website

Audio Reading: Rachel Hadas reads from Euripedes' poem ''Helen''

Audio Reading: Rachel Hadas reads a poem by Sappho
* ''

Contemporary Poetry Review Garrick Davis (born 1971 in Los Angeles) is an American poet and critic. He was Poetry Editor of ''First Things'' magazine from 2020 until 2021. Career Davis is the founding editor of the ''Contemporary Poetry Review'', the largest online arch ...

'' > 2009
Interview: ''The CPR Interview: Rachel Hadas''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hadas, Rachel 1948 births Living people American essayists American translators American women essayists American women poets Formalist poets Greek–English translators Johns Hopkins University alumni Princeton University alumni Radcliffe College alumni Rutgers University faculty The New Yorker people Writers from New York (state) People from Morningside Heights, Manhattan American women academics 21st-century American women