Theodore Weiss (Theodore Russell Weiss) Biography

American poet, born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Columbia University, New York. He began his academic career in 1941 at the University of Maryland. After holding a succession of posts at American universities, he was a Professor of English at Princeton from 1967 to 1987. The Catch (1951), his first collection of poetry, was followed by Outlanders (1960), Gunsight (1962), and The Medium (1965); The World Before Us: Poems 1950–1970 appeared in 1970. Weiss's early work, in which a formal debt to W. C. Williams is evident, is dominated by his interest in the longer poem as a vehicle for exploring his motivating psychological and cultural preoccupations. His later collections, which display an increasingly fluid lyricism, include Fireweeds (1976), Recoveries (1982), A Slow Fuse (1984), A Sum of Destructions (1994), and From Princeton One Autumn Afternoon: Collected Poems (1987). Weiss is also highly regarded for his critical writings, among which are The Breath of Clowns and Kings: A Study of Shakespeare (1971) and The Man from Porlock (1982), a collection of his essays.