Jean Garrigue (December 8, 1912 – December 27, 1972) was an American poet. In her lifetime, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a nomination for a National Book Award.
Life
Jean Garrigue was born Gertrude Louise Garrigus in Evansville, Indiana, to Allan Colfax and Gertrude (Heath) Garrigus. She was born in 1912 but later gave 1914 as her birth year. She had one sister, Marjorie, and one brother, Ross.
Garrigue lived in Indianapolis for much of her early life, graduating from Shortridge High School in 1931. After attending Butler University,
After meeting at Yaddo in 1949, Garrigue maintained a relationship with Josephine Herbst that lasted until Herbst died in 1969. The two exchanged thousands of letters over the years, and Garrigue frequently stayed at Herbst's farm in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. Garrigue also exchanged letters with Marianne Moore and Delmore Schwartz. She also contributed to several publications, including The New Leader, The New Republic, Saturday Review of Literature, The Kenyon Review, Tomorrow, Botteghe Oscure, Poetry, Commentary, Arts Magazine, and the New York Herald Tribune. was based on people Herbst met while staying at the Hotel Helvetia in Paris but was more likely based on Garrigue's stays at Erwinna with Herbst. She was also awarded and honored by the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Museum, National Academy of Arts and Letters, The Hudson Review, and Radcliffe Institute.
Garrigue was a teacher of English, creative writing, and poetry at several different universities, including the University of Iowa, Bard College, Queen's College, the New School, the University of Colorado, Smith College, and the University of Washington. Along with teaching, Garrigue was poet-in-residence for several institutions, including the University of California, Riverside, where she was resident in the Spring of 1972; she taught at Rhode Island College that fall until her health entered terminal decline. A critical study of Garrigue's work was published by Lee Upton in 1991.
Of the intensity and challenging nature of her poems, Randall Jarrell said that her work had "the guaranteeing and personal queerness of a diary," and many others have remarked on its uniqueness and strangeness.
Stanley Kunitz described Garrigue as one "whose art took the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom. She was our one lyric poet who made ecstasy her home." Bonne August wrote that "Garrigue is a 'difficult' poet, difficult in the formal demands she makes on the reader; difficult, too, in the demands she makes on her poetry: to take her past easy formulations, comfortable insights, or glib prescriptions, to the truth of a thing." Jane Mayhall noted her drive to the "dangerously deep levels of self."
Garrigue did not belong to a poetic school or movement; Theodore Roethke stated she trusted her poetic instincts more than any poet he knew.
Bibliography
- (Contributor) Five Young American Poets, third series, New Directions, 1944.
- The Ego and the Centaur (poems), New Directions, 1947, reprinted, Greenwood Press, 1972.
- (Contributor) Edwin Weaver, editor, Cross-Sections, L. B. Fischer, 1947.
- (Contributor) New World Writing, New American Library, 1952.
- The Monument Rose (poems), Noonday Press, 1953.
- A Water Walk by Villa d'Este (poems), St. Martins, 1959.
- Country Without Maps (poems), Macmillan, 1964.
- Marianne Moore, University of Minnesota Press, 1965.
- The Animal Hotel (novella), Eakins, 1966.
- New and Selected Poems, Macmillan, 1967.
- (Editor) Translations by American Poets, Ohio University Press, 1970.
- Studies for an Actress and Other Poems, Macmillan, 1973.
- (Compiler) Love's Aspects: The World's Great Love Poems, Doubleday, 1975.
- Selected Poems, University of Illinois, 1992.