Robert Peters

Robert Louis Peters (October 20, 1924 – June 13, 2014) was an American poet, critic, scholar, playwright, editor, and actor. He held a PhD in Victorian literature. Born in an impoverished rural area of northern Wisconsin in 1924, his poetry career began in 1967 when his young son Richard died unexpectedly of spinal meningitis. The book commemorating this loss, Songs for a Son, was selected by poet Denise Levertov to be published by W. W. Norton in 1967. Songs for a Son began a flood of poetry. Academic beginnings After army service during World War II, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, majoring in English. He received his BA in 1948, his MA in 1949 and his doctorate in 1952. His teaching career took him to Wayne State University, Boston University, Ohio Wesleyan University, the University of Idaho, the University of California, Riverside, and then the University of California, Irvine, where he first taught in 1967. His field of study was Victorian literature. In addition to publishing articles and monographs, he edited, with Herbert Schueller, the letters of John Addington Symonds. Peters received a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge, England, in the 1960s to work on Symonds's letters. In 1965, he published The Crowns of Apollo, a scholarly study on Algernon Charles Swinburne. After Peters's Songs for a Son was published, he devoted more time to the writing and study of contemporary poetry. Fellow poets Charles Wright and James McMichael and novelist Oakley Hall taught poetry at UC Irvine during this time and shared directorship of the university's Master of Fine Arts program. Poet and critic Peters was a prolific poet, having published some 30 books of poems, and he was an important critic of contemporary American poetry. In his controversial books of criticism—The Great American Poetry Bake-Off series, Peters Black and Blue Guides to Current Literary Magazines and Hunting the Snark: A Compendium of New Literary Terminology—he assessed more than 400 contemporary poets and critics. He also wrote poetry reviews for the Los Angeles Times. His Where the Bee Sucks: Workers, Drones & Queens of Contemporary American Poetry includes 35 essays on such major figures as Robert Bly, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Diane Wakoski, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Tess Gallagher and W. S. Merwin, as well as commentaries on the work of lesser-known poets.