Poet laureate Reed Whittemore dies

Reed Whittemore, who as a Yale sophomore in 1939 helped start a literary magazine that published some of the eminent poets of the age and who himself became a leading ambassador for poetry as writer, editor, college professor and twice poet laureate of the United States, died April 6 in Kensington, Md. He was 92.

The death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by his daughter Cate Whittemore. She said her father had dementia and also was diagnosed more than 45 years ago with myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disorder that made it hard to raise his arms, make a fist and even walk.

Whittemore took the steroid prednisone as a treatment for the disease, but found the side effects made him feel moody. Invoking his New England WASP pedigree, he once quipped, "One can easily see a connection between the last Puritans and myasthenia." This whimsical view of his illness was in keeping with the ironic playfulness of his poems. Whittemore delicately balanced the lyrical and conversational in much-anthologized poems exploring marriage and fatherhood, capitalism and bureaucracy, and the meaning of a poet in society. He also was a well-regarded essayist of broad tastes -- from Robert Browning to the Beats.

Don Share, the senior editor of Poetry magazine, said Whittemore had a "wide-ranging literary presence" for more than a half-century. Share called Whittemore a strong advocate for "poetry as part of public conversation, poems that engaged the way people talked and thought about politics." He described a materially comfortable but solitary upbringing that included a period under his paternal grandmother's roof when the family lost nearly all its money during the Depression.

Whittemore graduated in 1937 from the private Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and then entered Yale, by which time he had become drawn to socialist politics by the Depression and the Spanish Civil War. His interest in poetry was encouraged by a professor, Arthur Mizener, a prominent author and critic who became his mentor.