Translation, The Odyssey

Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was an American poet, critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics became standard works for a generation of scholars and students. He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin, and he also composed several books of his own poetry. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. From 1984 to 1985, he was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, the United States’ equivalent of a national poet laureate, but did not serve due to illness. He was an instructor at Sarah Lawrence College and Princeton University, poetry editor of the New Republic. He succeeded Archibald MacLeish as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard in 1965 and served until his retirement in 1981. In 1984 Fitzgerald received an honorary LHD from Bates College.