Alfred Corn

Alfred Corn is the author of eleven books of poems, the most recent titled Unions (2015) and two novels, the second titled Miranda’s Book, which also appeared in 2015. His two collections of essays are The Metamorphoses of Metaphor and Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007. He has received the Guggenheim, the NEA, an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and one from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, Connecticut College, The University of Cincinnati, and UCLA. In 2013 he was made a Life Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 2015 he was guest speaker at the new museum in Wuzhen, China, dedicated to the work of the painter and writer Mu Xin. In the spring of 2016 Chamán Ediciones in Spain published Rocinante, a selection of his work translated in Spanish, the same translation appearing the following year in Mexico under the title Antonio en el desierto. A new collection of essays titled Arks & Covenants appeared in May of 2017. In October of 2016, Roads Taken, a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Alfred Corn’s first book All Roads at Once was held at Poets’ House in New York City, and in November 2017 he will be inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame.   

Alfred Corn is one of our finest living poets….Best of all, despite the largeness of his expectations, Corn is no softie. He eschews sentimentality. He is humorous, observant, quick to see awkward details, human failings, ironic mishaps.

—Grace Schulman, The Nation

Alfred Corn is a national resource, a bard of astonishing breadth.

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Alfred Corn is one of our finest living poets….Best of all, despite the largeness of his expectations, Corn is no softie. He eschews sentimentality. He is humorous, observant, quick to see awkward details, human failings, ironic mishaps.

—Grace Schulman, The Nation

Airy, all‑seeing, a new window onto the world—this is an extremely beautiful first book. Among Mr. Corn's contemporaries I know of no poet more accomplished.

—James Merrill

Alfred Corn’s poems are exquisite, formal. They show a rare breadth of experience, observation and perception.

—Jane Henderson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

I know of nothing else of such ambition and realized power in Corn's own generation of American poets. He has had the skill and courage to confront, absorb, and renew our poetic tradition at its most vital.

—Harold Bloom

Few poets of our time have drawn upon the wisdom of experience with such unaffected honesty and tactful skill.  If Corn continues to write verse of such resonance, he will be a very important American poet indeed; as it is, at the age of 37, he stands at the forefront of his generation.

—Robert Shaw, The Nation

Whether writing in free verse or magically weaving in strict rhyme patterns, Corn combines memory and imagination into long, meditative poems that digress but never lose our interest.

—Rochelle Ratner, Library Journal

What gives Corn's work its force is that its elegance and control is never an end in itself. His poetry is for poetry’s sake, no doubt, but it is more urgently concerned with life.

—Matthew Gilbert, Boston Review

[Corn] understands art to be “always more than technical virtuosity,” his poetry never merely displays his considerable poetic skills, but rather becomes a mode of thought, an inquiry into art and passion, the limits of mastery, mortality, divinity, and the possible destiny of the human soul.

—Carolyn Forché