Rachel Hadas
Rachel Hadas is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Classics: Essays, and her most recent poetry collection is The Ache of Appetite. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.Biography
The daughter of noted Columbia University classicist Moses Hadas and Latin teacher Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas, Hadas grew up in Morningside Heights, New York City. She received a baccalaureate at Radcliffe College in classics, a Master of Arts at Johns Hopkins University in poetry, and a doctorate at Princeton University in comparative literature.
Marrying a man from the island of Samos and living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poets James Merrill and Alan Ansen, both of whom strongly influenced her early work, as did Cavafy, whose work she translated, and Seferis.
She is often associated with the New Formalism school of poetry, and her work was included in landmark collections of New Formalism including and A Formal Feeling Comes. Her subject matter ranges from her roots in the classics through the intimately personal, with memory a recurring theme throughout her work.
During the height of the AIDS crisis, she led poetry workshops for those afflicted, and edited a number of their works with Charles Barber, experiences that informed her subsequent work. Her translations of writers including Tibullus, Charles Baudelaire, and the Greek poet Konstantinos Karyotakis, have been published to much acclaim. She has taught English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University since 1981, where, as of 2006, she is the Board of Governors Professor of English. She was married to composer George Edwards until his death in 2011, and lives with their son in Manhattan.Poetry
;Broadsides
;Collections
- Questions in the Vestibule: Poems, Northwestern University Press, 2016,
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- The Ache of Appetite, Copper Beech Press, 2010,
- River of Forgetfulness, David Robert Books, 2006, ;
- Laws, University of Nebraska Press, 2004),
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- The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths
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- Mirrors of Astonishment
- Living in Time
- Pass It On, Princeton University Press, 1989,
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- Slow Transparency
;Chapbooks
- Starting from Troy
- "Two Poems"
;Translations
;Anthologies edited
- The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present
- Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop
;List of poems
| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected |
| Bird, weasel, fountain | | | |
| A poultice | 2016 | | |
| Love and dread | 2019 | | |
Essay collections
- Classics: Essays
- Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dreams
Memoirs
