Ramon Guthrie

Ramon Guthrie (January 14, 1896 – November 22, 1973) was a poet, novelist, essayist, critic, painter and professor of French and comparative literature. He published five collections of poetry, and two novels, translated three volumes of French nonfiction, edited two standard anthologies of French literature and published numerous reviews, essays and individual poems.

His legendary reputation among his contemporaries, many with extraordinary reputations of their own, is demonstrated by the festschrift honoring him upon his retirement from teaching. That volume, Ramon Guthrie Kaleidoscope, contains contributions by the poets: Dilys Laing, Lou B. ("Bink") Noll, Phillip Booth and Tristan Tzara; the critics, Malcolm Cowley, M. L. Rosenthal and Irita Bradford Van Doren; the artists, Stella Bowen, Alexander Calder, Peter Blume and Ray Nash and the journalist, George Seldes plus some two dozen other contributors. However, even though Germaine Bree would write of his penultimate collection, Asbestos Phoenix, that "[It] alone would place Ramon Guthrie among the major poets of the mid-century," and his masterpiece, Maximum Security Ward would be greeted in 1970 with critical acclaim and would receive the Marjorie Peabody Waite award, Guthrie and his masterpiece would be neglected.Malcolm Cowley, a major critic of Guthrie's generation, writing 10 years after the publication of Maximum Security Ward, would say of Guthrie and of MSW's reception: "Among the talented writers I have known, the most curiously neglected is the poet and scholar Ramon Guthrie. He started out with the famous writers of the World War I generation, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and others, some of whom were his good friends. His best writing was on a level with theirs." ) Another major critic of the 20th century, M. L. Rosenthal, would choose Maximum Security Ward and Other Poems to be the first volume in Persea Book's Lamplighter Series of significant modern poets because he felt that Guthrie had been neglected and ought to remain in print. Rosenthal said of Guthrie that he had been ignored "For no good reason, really -- only the familiar general indifference to the real thing and identification of publicity with reputation."

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