ALFRED CORN is an American poet and essayist, born on this date in Valdosta, Georgia. His first book of poems, All Roads at Once, appeared in 1976, followed six other volumes of poetry and a novel titled Part of His Story, as well as a study of prosody, The Poem’s Heartbeat. He has since written seven more books, including a collectino of essays titled The Metamorphoses of Metaphor.

Corn was awarded the 1982 Levinson Prize by Poetry Magazine.

Corn also received an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. In 1987, he was awarded a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets.

Additional fellowships and prizes awarded for his poetry include the National Endowment for the Arts and a residency at The Bellagio Center for the Rockefeller Foundation. 

The critic Harold Bloom singled out Corn’s All Roads at Once as the best first book of that year (The New Republic, 1976) and said in a jacket comment for A Call in the Midst of the Crowd:

“Alfred Corn’s second book of poems goes well beyond fulfilling the authentic promise of his first. The title poem is an extraordinary and quite inevitable extension of the New York tradition of major visionary poems, which goes from Poe’s ‘City in the Sea’ and Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ to Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Ashbery’s ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.’ Corn achieves an authority and resonance wholly worthy of his precursors. I know of nothing else of such ambition and realized power in Corn’s own generation of American poets. He has had the skill and courage to confront, absorb, and renew our poetic tradition at its most vital. His aesthetic prospects are remarkable, even in this crowded time.”

For many years (1983–2001) he taught in the Graduate Writing Program of the Columbia University School of the Arts and has held visiting posts at UCLA, the City University of New York, the University of Cincinnati, Ohio State University, Oklahoma State University, Sarah Lawrence, Yale University, and the University of Tulsa. As critic, he has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Washington Post Book World, and The New Republic.

Beginning in 1989 and continuing to the present, he has published reviews and articles for Art in America and ARTnews magazines. For 2004–2005, he held the Amy Clampitt residency in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 2005–2006, he lived in London, teaching a course for the Poetry School, and one for the Arvon Foundation at Totleigh Barton, Devon. In 2007 he directed a poetry-writing course at Wroxton College in Oxfordshire, and in 2008 he taught at the Almássera Vella Arts Center in Spain. His first play, Lowell’s Bedlam opened at Pentameters Theatre in London in 2011. He was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge in 2012 and after his residency was made a Life Fellow. In the same year, he published an e-book, Transatlantic Bridge: A Concise Guide to American and British English, detailing differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar and punctuation.

During the years 1967-1968 he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship with his wife Ann Jones, whom he met three years earlier in France during a summer study program. After he and Ann Jones divorced, he was partnered with the architect Walter Brown in the years 1971–1976 and then with J.D. McClatchy from 1977 until 1989.