Robert Stuart Fitzgerald (12 October 1910 – 16 January 1985) was an American poet, literary critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students". He is best known as a translator of ancient works of Homer and Virgil. He also composed several books of poetry.
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Biography
Fitzgerald was born in Geneva, New York, in 1910, in an Irish-American family. Both his parents were actors; his mother died when he was 3, his father when he was 17. He grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and graduated from The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he met Dudley Fitts, a poet. He entered Harvard in 1929, and in 1931 a number of his poems were published in Poetry magazine. After graduating from Harvard in 1933 he became a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune for a year.
Later he worked for several years for Time. In 1940, William Saroyan lists him among "associate editors" at Time in the play, Love's Old Sweet Song. Whittaker Chambers mentions him as a colleague in his 1952 memoir, Witness.
In World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy in Guam and Pearl Harbor. Later he was an instructor at Sarah Lawrence 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.
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. In 1984 Fitzgerald received a L.H.D. from Bates College.