John Hall Wheelock

Wheelock's parents encouraged the reading and memorization of poetry, and told of the time when they had seen the great poet Walt Whitman, when John was a baby. Wheelock graduated from Harvard University in 1908, and was class poet. In 1910, he began work with Charles Scribner and Sons and by 1947 had risen to the position of senior editor. During his career he worked with such distinguished authors as Thomas Wolfe and James Truslow Adams and is noted for discovering poets May Swenson and James Dickey. Wheelock's published volume of Collected Works was awarded the Golden Rose by the New England Poetry Society in 1936, as the most distinguished contribution to American poetry of that year. For his work Poems Old and New he received the Ridgely Torrence Memorial Award in 1956, and the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1957. In 1962 he won the Bollingen Prize; in 1965 the Signet Society Medal, Harvard University, for distinguished achievement in the arts. In 1972 he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Poetry Society of America for notable achievement in poetry..so often a great poem is just sheer good luck because the language permits certain effects to be made by someone with long discipline in the use of language, who has a flash in which the words and ideas just fall in a particular way. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Poetry Society of America (Vice president, 1944-1946), National Institute of Arts and Letters (vice-president), and the Academy of American Poets (chancellor, 1947–71; honorary fellow, 1974-1978). He was an honorary consultant in American letters to the Library of Congress. In 1940, John Hall Wheelock married Phyllis E. DeKay, the daughter of Charles DeKay, poet and art critic.

• Verses by Two Undergraduates * * * * * • The Bright Doom, Scribner, 1927 • Collected Poems, 1911-1936, Scribner, 1936 • Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, 1950. (editor) • Poems Old and New, Scribner, 1956 • The Gardner and Other Poems, Scribner, 1961 • What is Poetry?, Scribner, 1963 • Dear Men and Women: New Poems, Scribner, 1966 • By Daylight and in Dream: New and Collected Poems, 1904-1970, Scribner, 1970 • In Love and Song: Poems, Scribner, 1971. • Nirvana