William Logan’s new collection of criticism, Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History, was published last spring by Columbia University Press. He was born in Boston in 1950 and educated at Yale and the University of Iowa. He is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, Sad-faced Men (1982), Difficulty (1985), Sullen Weedy Lakes (1988), Vain Empires (1998), Night Battle (1999), Macbeth in Venice (2003), The Whispering Gallery (2005), Strange Flesh (Penguin, 2008), Deception Island: Selected Early Poems (2011), and Rift of Light (2017). He is also the author of seven books of essays and reviews, All the Rage (1998), Reputations of the Tongue (1999, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism), Desperate Measures (2002), The Undiscovered Country (2005, winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism), Our Savage Art (2009), Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure (2014), and Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods (2018). His edition of John Townsend Trowbridge’s lost classic, Guy Vernon, was published by University of Minnesota Press in the spring of 2012. He has received the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Poetry’s J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize, Sewanee Review’s Allen Tate Prize, Centenary College’s Corrington Medal, and the Randall Jarrell Award of the Pegasus Foundation. He teaches at the University of Florida, where he is Alumni/ae Professor of English, and lives in Florida and Cambridge, England.
Articles by William Logan View All
Verse chronicle June 2023
Down on the corner
On new poetry by B. H. Fairchild, Devin Johnston, Sharon Olds, Robin Coste Lewis, Thomas Kinsella & Ada Limón.
Poems May 2023
Garden at odds
Features April 2023
Darkness visible: Auden collected
On the evolution of W. H. Auden’s poetry.
December 17, 2018
William Logan & James Panero discuss poetry & criticism
featuring &
William Logan and James Panero discuss “Identity cards,” Logan’s most recent poetry chronicle for The New Criterion.