PRATT, William C(rouch, Jr.) 1927-

PERSONAL: Born October 5, 1927, in Shawnee, OK; son of William Crouch (a shoe store owner) and Irene (Johnston) Pratt; married Anne Cullen Rich, October 2, 1954; children: Catherine Cullen, William Stuart, Randall Johnston. Education: University of Oklahoma, B.A., 1949; Vanderbilt University, M.A., 1951, Ph.D. (English), 1957; University of Glasgow, graduate study, 1951-52. Politics: Republican. Religion: Episcopalian.

ADDRESSES: Home—212 Oakhill Dr., Oxford, OH 45056. Offıce—Department of English, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056.

CAREER: Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, instructor in English, 1955-57; Miami University, Oxford, OH, 1957—, began as instructor, associate professor and director of freshman English, 1964-69, professor of English, beginning 1968, currently professor emeritus. University College, Dublin, Ireland, Fulbright professor of American literature, 1975-76; Miami University European Center, Luxembourg, resident scholar, fall, 1976; lecturer, Yeats International Summer School, Sligo, Ireland, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, and James Joyce Summer School, Dublin, 1996; writer in residence, Tyrone Guthrie Center, County Monaghan, Ireland, summers, 1992, 1996. Military service: U.S. Naval Reserve, 1945-46, 1953-55; became lieutenant.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, National Council of Teachers of English, Ohio English Association, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Rotary fellowship.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature, Dutton (New York, NY), 1963, revised edition, Story Line Press (Ashland, OR), 2001.

The Fugitive Poets, Dutton (New York, NY), 1965, revised edition published as The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective, J. S. Sanders (Nashville, TN), 1991.

The College Writer: Essays for Composition, Scribner (New York, NY), 1969.

Ezra Pound: The London Years, 1908-1920, AMS Press (New York, NY), 1978.

Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1979.

(Translator, with Anne Rich Pratt, editor and author of introduction) René Taupin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry, AMS Press (New York, NY), 1985.

(Editor, with Robert Richardson) Homage to Imagism, AMS Press (New York, NY), 1992.

Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1996.

(Editor and author of preface) Phillip R. Shriver, Miami University: A Personal History, Miami University Press (Oxford, OH), 1998.

(Editor) Ezra Pound: Nature and Myth, preface by Hugh Kenner, AMS Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Also author of College Days at Old Miami, 1984, Miami Poets, 1988, and The Big Ballad Jamboree, 1996. Contributor to Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1969.

SIDELIGHTS: William C. Pratt is best known for his scholarship on the Modernist poets. His first book, The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature, is an anthology of poems by such seminal Modernists as H. D., T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and others. A contributor to the Bloomsbury Review dubbed the original edition, which appeared in 1963, "the cornerstone anthology of Modernism"; a new edition appeared in 2001. Pratt has also published scholarly works on writers of the American South, on Ezra Pound, and on teaching composition at the college level; he and Anne Rich Pratt translated René Taupin's treatise The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry.

In 1996, Pratt published a collection of critical essays on the Modernist poets he had been reading, teaching, and writing about for forty years. The essays collected in Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry are "packed with rich observation," according to Johanna Keller in the Antioch Review, who added that "Pratt's best insights are about Pound, Eliot, and Yeats." John L. Brown, who reviewed the volume for World Literature Today, likewise noted that "Pound and Eliot play stellar roles" in Pratt's history of the development of Modernism, and praised the author's important observations on the contributions of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Rainer Maria Rilke. While Keller complained of Pratt's old-fashioned use of gendered language throughout the essays, Brown found the author's essay on Laura Riding, who conducted "one of the spiciest of the literary scandals of the period," "a welcome dash of sauce piquante to his scholarly prose." For her part, Keller concluded that despite its minor flaws, "for usefulness, breadth, and clarity, [Singing the Chaos] is one of the best-written and most insightful guides to Modernism."

Pratt once told CA: "Writing, for me, has always been the link between reading literature and teaching it. Reading, writing, and teaching flow so naturally into each other that I tend to think of them not as separate activities, but as connected ways of thinking. Happily, I find that as I grow older, my appetite for reading and writing and teaching increases along with my enjoyment of them. So the literary profession keeps me drinking at the fountain of youth; I read more, write more, teach more with every passing year, and I am more and more satisfied, though my thirst is never filled."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Agenda, autumn, 1993, review of Homage to Imagism, p. 151.

Antioch Review, fall, 1996, Johanna Keller, review of Singing the Chaos, p. 495.

Bloomsbury Review, March-April, 2002, review of The Imagist Poem.

Choice, October, 1996, review of Singing the Chaos, p. 280.

Reference and Research Book News, September, 1996, review of Singing the Chaos, p. 57.

South Carolina Review, fall, 1994, review of Homage to Imagism and The Fugitive Poets, p. 351.

Times Literary Supplement, March 19, 1993, review of Homage to Imagism, p. 5.

World Literature Today, spring, 1992, review of The Fugitive Poets, p. 416; fall, 1996, John L. Brown, review of Singing the Chaos, p. 1039.*