Eberhart, Richard [key], 1904–2005, American poet, b. Austin, Minn., grad. Dartmouth (1926) and Cambridge (1929, 1933). He taught at various universities before becoming a professor at Dartmouth (1956–71). His poetry, noted for its lyric simplicity and directness, has as frequent themes the loss of innocence and spontaneity and the conflict between matter and spirit. Among his several dozen volumes of poetry are A Bravery of Earth (1930), Undercliff (1953), Shifts of Being (1968), and Ways of Light (1980). His poems are collected in Selected Poems, 1930–1965 (1965; Pulitzer Prize), Collected Poems, 1930–1976 (1976), The Long Reach: New and Uncollected Poems, 1948–1984 (1984), and New and Selected Poems: 1930–1990 (1990). Eberhart's Collected Verse Plays was published in 1962. He was the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress from 1959 to 1961.
See biography by B. E. Engel (1971); studies by R. J. Mills, Jr. (1966), J. Roache (1971), and S. Lea and J. Parini, ed. (1980); descriptive bibliography by S. Wright (1989).
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