Allen Grossman

Allen Grossman, born on January 7, 1932, in Minneapolis, was an American poet and scholar. He attended Harvard University between the years of 1949 and 1956, where he earned both his BA and MA and was awarded the Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize, as well as the Academy of American Poets Prize. In 1960, he received his PhD from Brandeis University.

Grossman is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Descartes’ Loneliness (New Directions, 2007); How to Do Things with Tears (New Directions, 2001); The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected (1979–1991) (New Directions, 1992), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Of The Great House (New Directions, 1982); The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River (New Directions, 1979); The Recluse (Pym-Randall Press, 1965); and A Harlot’s Hire (Boars Head Press, 1959). He was also the author of some volumes of criticism, notably The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

Grossman taught at Brandeis, where he was the Paul E. Prosswimmer Professor of Poetry and General Education from 1957 to 1991. In 1991, he became the Emeritus Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, in 1971 he was a visiting professor at the Universitat HaNegev (now, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) in Beersheba, Israel. Grossman received teaching honors throughout his career. In 1987, he was the CASE Massachusetts State Professor of the Year. He received a Distinguished Faculty Award from Johns Hopkins in 1999.

Among Grossman’s honors for his writing are a Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale University in 2009; three Pushcart Prizes (1990, 1987, 1975); a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982; and a Witter Bynner Poetry Prize in 1981. In 1993, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Grossman died on June 27, 2014, in Chelsea, Massachusetts.