Edgar Bowers

Edgar Bowers (; March 2, 1924 – February 4, 2000) was an American poet who won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1989 and two Guggenheim fellowships. In selecting Mr. Bowers, the judges cited his 1973 work, Living Together: New and Selected Poems, saying that it "cemented Mr. Bowers's reputation as a poet of enduring work." Harold Bloom declared Bowers one of the 20th century’s masters and included his work Living Together: New and Selected Poems in his list of works constituting the Western Canon.

Biography Bowers was born in Rome, Georgia, in 1924. During World War II, he joined the military and worked in counter-intelligence against Germany, which would later inform much of his writing. He was stationed for a year at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s retreat in the Alps.

He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1950 and after the war, he earned his MA and PhD in English literature from Stanford University. He wrote five collections of poetry, including For Louis Pasteur (1990), The Astronomers (1965) and The Form of Loss (1956). He taught English at the University of California, Santa Barbara for most of his career. He often wrote in rhyme, but also produced blank verse in the English language. He wrote very little (his Collected Poems weighs in at 168 pages).

Bowers retired in 1991 and died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma at his home in San Francisco on February 4, 2000, the day after his companion, James Davis, died. In 2003, UCLA hosted a conference and exhibit in Bowers’s honor.