....was born in Gloucester, Mass..... into a poor “totally non-literary family,” he recalled in an interview with the Rutgers literary magazine Scriblerus. His father was a fisherman. A high school English teacher fostered his interest in reading.
And from the same source this summation of his significance:
Richard Poirier, a prolific and populist cultural critic who founded a literary journal, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, ....[was] a founder of Library of America, the nonprofit publisher of American classics....
[He] ......was an old-fashioned man of letters — a writer, an editor, a publisher, a teacher — with a wide range of knowledge and interests. He was a busy reviewer for publications from The New York Review of Books to The London Review of Books, and his reviews could sting.
His own works were ambitious and forward-looking and idiosyncratic, addressing the teaching profession, the notion of style in American literature and the relationship between high and low culture. He wrote about Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, but also George Balanchine and Bette Midler....
Mr. Poirier, who was a longtime professor of English at Rutgers, founded Raritan, an influential literary journal based there, in 1981. The magazine was an attempt — successful, by most standards — to engage both academics and non-academics “in a conversation about literature and culture,”....
[A colleague said Poirier]..."believed you could be playful and rigorous. And he thought that the academy [unfortunately] had cut off criticism from a lot of ordinary readers."
In...[Raritan] could be found the poetry of John Hollander, ....as well as the work of ... the Palestinian-American writer Edward Said, the literary critic Frank Kermode, the dissident feminist Camille Paglia.... and Vicki Hearne, whose essays and poems explored the consciousness of animals....
The Library of America canonized some American literature. But smaller more significant honors cannot really be counted. Such as the circle of those writers who have a cat memorialized by a great writer. This circle includes at least Richard Poirer and Alice Adams. (I CAN think of another example).
Alice Adams (1926-1999) wrote in "As You Were Saying" about Poirier's cat Rosebud.
AS YOU WERE SAYING
for Richard Poirier
Telling me about Rosebud
(But not saying, 'put to sleep')
'A beautiful cat, so beautiful,
Even as she died,'
You say, on the phone,
And that was true,
I had met her:
A lithe lovely shy tabbycat,
....
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