Maurice English was a poet, publisher, translator, and journalist born in Chicago, Illinois. A graduate of Harvard, he worked as a journalist in the United States and Europe for twenty years before beginning his career as an editor and publisher. Over three decades, English held the roles of founding editor of Chicago Magazine, senior editor of the University of Chicago Press, founding director of the Temple University Press, and director of the University of Pennsylvania Press.
English, whose poetry collections Midnight in the Century and A Savaging of Roots were published, was also a prominent translator of Eugenio Montale. His honors include a Fulbright scholarship, a MacDowell fellowship, and a Friends of Literature Award.
He is survived by his daughter, Deirdre English, an author and editor, and his stepchildren, Ilene Weiss and Matthew Drutt.
In 1977, English lost his son Brian, 31, when he accidentally drowned in a riptide off the Na Pali coast of Kauai, Hawaii. In “The Flowing World,” written in 1955 when his son was nine, he had written of the long life he envisioned for Brian in the context of generations, eternity, and how, in time, the poet’s own life and all lives are swept away… “drowned and swept off.” He never read that poem aloud again after his son died.
“What Happens is This” was published in The New Republic in 1978. In commemoration of Brian’s death, Helen W. Drutt English, English’s second wife, visited Kauai in 1981, followed in September of 1983 by English and his daughter Deirdre English, who flew together in a helicopter over the site of Brian’s drowning. “Omega,” his last poem, was written in October 1983, one month before his death. These poems remain as English’s epitaph as well as his son’s. Brian had left his Omega watch on the beach before he drowned. Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, was also English’s final poem.
“The Key,” “Wading In,” “The Weaving,” “Omega,” and “The Apple Tree” are published here for the first time. Helen W. Drutt English is a craft historian and curator, and in “The Weaving” (1977, finished 1983), English threads his wife and himself through his dead son’s eye into the vast tapestry of “all the waters of the world,” creating Brian’s threnody.
The Maurice English Poetry Award, founded after his death in 1983, has honored Paul Muldoon, Marie Howe, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Li-Young Lee, Susan Stewart, Jean Valentine, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among many other poets. Their fires flicker on his early grave, as constellations are models of lost light.
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Photo by Deirdre English.