Michael Schmidt (poet)

Michael Schmidt OBE^[1] FRSL^[2] (born 2 March 1947)^[3] is a Mexican-British poet, author, scholar and publisher.

Early life[edit]

Born in Mexico City, Mexico, Schmidt was educated at The Hill School from 1959 to 1965 and earned an English-Speaking Union Scholarship to attend Christ's Hospital School (1965–66). He studied at Harvard University and at Wadham College, Oxford University.

Career[edit]

Schmidt was Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University until 2014, the Writer in Residence at St. John's College, Cambridge, from 2012 to 2015 and a visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2017 to 2018. He is founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press and a founder (1973) and general editor of PN Review.

A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (elected in 1993),^[2] Schmidt received an OBE in 2006 for services to poetry.^[4] His literary career has been described as having "a strong sense of internationalism and cultural 'connectedness'".^[5] Schmidt refers to himself in his 1998 book Lives of the Poets as "an Anglophone Mexican publisher".^[5]

Schmidt's 2014 book, The Novel: A Biography, is a loosely chronological history of the development of the novel.^[6] The book aims to explore the relationships between great novelists, including views by other novelists, while avoiding literary critics who were not also writers.^[7]

In August 2015, Schmidt was one of 20 authors of Poets for Corbyn, an anthology of poems endorsing Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election.^[8][9]

Selected bibliography[edit]

Poetry[edit]

• It Was My Tree (Anvil, 1970)
• Bedlam and the Oak Wood (Carcanet, 1970)
• Desert of the Lions (Carcanet, 1972)
• My Brother Gloucester (Carcanet, 1976)
• A Change of Affairs (Anvil, 1978)
• The Love of Strangers – Poetry Book Society Special Commendation (Century Hutchinson, 1989)
• Selected Poems, 1972-1997 – Poetry Book Society Special Commendation (Smith/Doorstop, 1997)
• The Resurrection of the Body (USA: Sheep Meadow; Smith/Doorstop, 2007)
• Collected Poems (Smith/Doorstop, 2009, Sheep Meadow Press, 2010)
• The Stories of My Life (Smith/Doorstop 2013)

Fiction[edit]

• The Colonist – Los Angeles Times book award (Muller/Hutchinson, 1983; published in USA as Green Island, Vanguard, 1984, Dell, 1985)
• The Dresden Gate (Century Hutchinson, 1988; Vanguard, 1989)

Criticism[edit]

• Reading Modern Poetry (London: Routledge, 1989), ISBN 0-415-01568-5
• Lives of the Poets (Phoenix, 1998), ISBN 978-0-7538-0745-3
• The Story of Poetry: From Cædmon to Caxton; From Skelton to Dryden; From Pope to Burns (three volumes) (2001–2006)
• The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets (2004)
• The Novel: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014)
• Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019)

Anthologies[edit]

• New Poetries I-VIII (Carcanet, 1994–2018)
• Eleven British Poets (Methuen, 1980)
• The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1999, 2005) (editor)
• A Calendar of Modern Poetry (PN Review 100, 1994)
• The Great Modern Poets(inc audio excerpts) Quercus Poetry, 2006, ISBN 9780857382467

References[edit]

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Michael Schmidt (poet).

• Official website
• Biography on Carcanet Press
• Profile on Contemporary Writers
• "What, How Well, Why?"—Schmidt's Lecture from StAnza, Scotland's annual poetry festival
• Podcast interview with Schmidt by André Naffis-Sahely, 2 December 2009.