R. P. Blackmur

Richard Palmer Blackmur (1904-1965) was an American literary critic and poet. He was born and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. An autodidact, Blackmur worked in a bookshop after graduating from high school, and attended lectures at Harvard University without enrolling. In 1935 he published his first volume of criticism, The Double Agent; during the 1930s his criticism was influential among many modernist poets and the New Critics.

In 1940 Blackmur moved to Princeton University, where he taught first creative writing and then English literature for the next twenty-five years. He founded and directed the university's Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism.

External links

• Blackmur from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
• Blackmur from A Princeton Companion by Alexander Leitch (1978)
• "No Success Like Failure", a discussion of Blackmur's career from the New York Review of Books (abstract online; full text for subscribers only)