Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt (formerly published as Stephen Burt) is an American literary critic and poet who is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. The New York Times has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation." Burt grew up around Washington, D.C. She has published various collections of poetry and a large amount of literary criticism and research. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, and other publications.

Literary criticism Elliptical poetry Burt received significant attention for coining the term "Elliptical poetry" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's book Smokes in Boston Review magazine: Elliptical poets try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-"postmodern": they have read (most of them) Stein's heirs, and the "language writers," and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively "poetic") diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning "I am an X, I am a Y." Ellipticism's favorite established poets are Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and/or Auden [...] The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television. Burt also adds that Elliptical poets are "good at describing information overload."

Poets whom she cites as examples of The New Thing include Rae Armantrout, Michael O'Brien, Justin Marks, Elizabeth Treadwell, and Graham Foust.

She has an interest in the work of the writer Randall Jarrell, and Burt's book Randall Jarrell and His Age reevaluates Jarrell's importance as a poet. The book won the Warren–Brooks Award in 2002. In explaining her book's aim, Burt wrote: "Many readers know Jarrell as the author of several anthology poems [...] a charming book or two for children, and a panoply of influential reviews. This book aims to illuminate a Jarrell more ambitious, more complex, and more important than that." In 2005, she also edited Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, a collection of Jarrell's critical essays, with Hannah Brooks-Motl.

She sometimes writes for a popular audience for Slate and The New Yorker,

Career Burt earned an AB from Harvard University in 1994 and a PhD from Yale University in 2000 Since 2007, she has worked at Harvard University, where she became a tenured professor in 2010. On it, they play various superhero-based role-playing games and have 13 episodes across 2 seasons; the show has been on hiatus since August 2023.

In the Spring 2024 semester, Burt taught a course at Harvard University called "Taylor Swift and Her World", an English course about the musical works of American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. The course was met with widespread enthusiasm, enrolling almost 200 Harvard College undergraduate students. In October 2025, she published a book based on the course, Taylor's Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift.

Burt has published four books of her own poetry, Popular Music (1999), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, Parallel Play (2006), Belmont (2013), Advice From The Lights (2017), and We are Mermaids (2022).

Personal life Burt is a trans woman and uses she/her and they/them pronouns. She has been active in LGBTQ rights campaigns.