Babette Deutsch
Babette Deutsch was an influential American poet, novelist, critic, and translator, born in New York City on September 22, 1895. She began her literary career while studying at Barnard College, publishing her first poems in notable magazines. Her debut poetry collection, "Banners," was released in 1919, shortly after her graduation. Throughout her career, she produced a wide array of works, including novels, critical essays, and children's biographies, while actively engaging in the Jewish community. Deutsch played a significant role in promoting African American literature during the 1920s and 1930s by judging competitions alongside prominent literary figures. In the early 1920s, she participated in a groundbreaking expedition to the Soviet Union to acquire library materials, collecting thousands of volumes that were pivotal for scholarly resources. Her poetry often reflects her Jewish heritage and grapples with the emotional aftermath of the Holocaust. Notable collections include "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" and "Collected Poems." Her literary criticism, particularly "Poetry in Our Time," became essential reading in American universities for many years.
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Babette Deutsch
Poet
- Born: September 22, 1895
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: November 13, 1982
Biography
Babette Deutsch was born in New York City on September 22, 1895. She had her first poems published in magazines, including the North American Review and the New Republic while she was still a student at Barnard College. Her first volume of poetry, Banners, was published in 1919, just two years after her graduation from Barnard in 1917. Many novels, critical works, and fictional works, and biographies for children followed.
Deutsch was not only a celebrated poet, novelist, critic, translator, and editor, she was also the wife of Avrahm Yarmolinsky, himself a noted critic and scholar. In addition to her writing, Deutsch devoted much of her time to the Jewish community and to other public activities. She frequently worked with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, serving, in one capacity, as a lecturer in the organization’s poetry center. She also was one of many distinguished literary figures, including Robert Frost, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, H. G. Wells, and Eugene O’Neill, who judged competitions among African American writers in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The willing and enthusiastic participation of such noted writers is said to have lent an air of mainstream authority to the contests and to have further established the importance of African American literature in the minds of the predominantly white reading public and publishing world.
In the winter of 1923, Deutsch, her husband, who was the chief curator of the then-Slavonic division of the New York Public Library, and Harry Miller Lydenberg, the library’s chief of reference, represented the library on a pioneering expedition to the Soviet Union. They made the trip expressly to acquire library materials and to reestablish the normal channels (disrupted by the revolution of 1917 and subsequent civil war) for the supply of current and retrospective monographs and serials. The trio collected more than nine thousand volumes from the pre- and postrevolutionary periods, and many more books arrived on exchange in the decade that followed. Joseph Stalin’s ascendancy to power in the mid-1930’s brought an end to the creation and acquisition of such materials.
In 1958, Deutsch was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1969 she served as the organization’s secretary. Additionally, she was a member of the advisory board of the National Book Committee, chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, and a consultant for the Library of Congress.
Much of her poetry deals with her Jewish heritage. In her 1925 volume Honey out of the Rock, she deals with a number of Biblical and Jewish themes. Her final three volumes of poetry deal with her anger at the horrors of the Holocaust as she tries to make sense of so great a tragedy. The best known of her many volumes of poetry include Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (1954), Coming of Age (1959), Collected Poems (1963), and The Collected Poems of Babette Deutsch(1969). Her volumes of literary criticism, Poetry in Our Time (1952), and Poetry Handbook (1957), were standard English texts in American universities for many years. As recently as 2005, the National Book Foundation sent a letter to its Summer Writing Camp participants which included Deutsch’s The Poetry Handbook as one of its required readings.