Burnshaw, Stanley 1906–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born June 20, 1906, in New York, NY; died September 16, 2005, in Martha's Vineyard, MA. Publisher, critic, translator, and author. Especially respected as a critic and translator of poetry, the multitalented Burnshaw also wrote verse, plays, and novels and was noted for his friendship with and defense of Robert Frost, as seen in his biography Robert Frost Himself. The son of European immigrants, Burnshaw earned his B.A. in 1925 from the University of Pittsburgh. His love of poetry then led to his founding a small magazine called Poetry Folio. Of course, such small press endeavors earn little money, so Burnshaw worked as an advertising manager for the Blaw-Knox Steel Corp. in Pennsylvania for two years. He then studied for two years in France before returning home. Burnshaw also worked in advertising at the Hecht Co. in New York City while continuing his studies at Cornell University, where he completed an M.A. in 1933. After graduating, Burnshaw found a job with a leftist magazine called New Masses, for which he served as a drama critic and editor despite the fact that he was not a Communist. During the late 1930s, Burnshaw was vice president of the publishing house Cordon Co. in New York City. He then decided to found his own publishing company, Dryden Press, in 1939. He headed the company until 1958, when it was bought by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Burnshaw decided to stay with Holt after the merger, and he worked for the publisher for the next ten years as a vice president before retiring. Throughout the years, Burnshaw produced a steady stream of books, ranging from poetry collections, such as Poems (1927), The Caged Animal's Mind (1963), and In the Terrified Radiance (1972), and the novels The Sunless Sea (1948) and four-volume The Refusers: An Epic of the Jews (1981), to the travel book Mirages: Travel Notes in the Promised Land (1977) and the political allegory The Revolt of the Cats in Paradise (1945). He was most acclaimed for his work as a poetry critic and translator, earning praise for his translations in Early and Late Testament (1952) and for his insightful look into the poetic imagination, The Seamless Web: Language-Thinking, Creature-Knowledge, Art-Experience (1970); his edited works The Poem Itself: Forty-five Modern Poets in a New Presentation (1960) and The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself: Twenty-four Modern Hebrew Poets in a New Presentation (1965) are widely considered to be landmarks in the field of poetry translation. Burnshaw's last book, Andre Spire and His Poetry, was an anthology released in 2002.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2005, p. B9.

New York Times, September 17, 2005, p. B16.

Washington Post, September 19, 2005, p. B4.