Poet and critic William Logan was born in Boston and earned degrees from Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 1975, his work— both poetry and criticism— has regularly appeared in major journals and publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The New Criterion. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Sad-Faced Men (1982), Difficulty (1985), Sullen Weedy Lakes (1988), Vain Empires (1998), Night Battle (1999), Poetry and the Age (2000), Macbeth in Venice (2003), Whispering Gallery (2005), Strange Flesh (2008), Deception Island: Selected Earlier Poems (2011), Madame X (2012), and Rift of Light (2017).
Logan’s poetry is distinguished by its intricate formal structures; his work frequently uses traditional forms such as the sonnet, and rhyme and meter schemes, to explore concepts of truth and art as well as various ironies of the human condition.
Logan’s books of criticism include All the Rage: Prose on Poetry 1976-1992 (1998), Reputations of the Tongue: Essays on Poets and Poetry (1999), Desperate Measures (2002), The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin (2005), Our Savage Art (2005), Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure (2012), Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (2018), and Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History (2021).
William Logan is a professor of English at the University of Florida, where he teaches in the MFA program. His numerous honors and awards include a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism; he is also the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Florida Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Logan has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, as well as their Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.