John Frederick Nims (November 20, 1913 in Muskegon, Michigan – January 13, 1999, aged 85, in Chicago, Illinois) was an American poet and academic.

Life

He graduated from DePaul University, University of Notre Dame with an M.A., and from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in 1945.

He published reviews of early works by Robert Lowell and W. S. Merwin. He taught English at Harvard University, the University of Florence, the University of Toronto, Williams College, University of Missouri, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He was editor of Poetry magazine from 1978 to 1984.

The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize, for poetry translation, is awarded by the Poetry Foundation.

Awards

  • American Academy of Arts and Letters grant
  • National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities grant
  • Institute of the Humanities fellowship
  • 1982 Academy of American Poets fellowship
  • 1986 Guggenheim Fellowship
  • 1991 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
  • 1993 O.B. Hardison Prize

Bibliography

  • The Powers Of Heaven And Earth: New And Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2002)
  • Zany in Denim (University of Arkansas Press, 1990)
  • , selected for the New York Public Library's Ninety from the Nineties.
  • The Kiss: A Jambalaya (1982)
  • Of Flesh and Bone (1967)
  • Knowledge of the Evening (1960), which was nominated for a National Book Award
  • A Fountain in Kentucky (1950)
  • Five Young American Poets (1944)

Anthologies

Translations

  • Euripides: Four Tragedies (1958)
  • Sappho to Valery: Poems in Translation (1971)
  • Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (1983)

Editor

  • Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567 (1965)

Criticism

References

  • John Domini (1982) Review of The Kiss: A Jambalaya The Boston Phoenix