Richard Eberhart

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Richard Ghormley Eberhart grew up on his family’s estate, Burr Oaks, in Austin, Minnesota. His early life was almost idyllic. His father, Alpha LaRue Eberhart, the son of a Methodist minister, typified the American Dream, having worked his way up from being a farmhand at the age of fourteen to becoming a business owner at the age of twenty-one. Working for the Hormel company, where he trained as a salesperson, he accumulated a fortune; by the time his son Richard was born, he had been able to buy Burr Oaks, an eighteen-room house on forty acres of land. Here the poet, his brother Dryden (b. 1902), and his sister Elizabeth (b. 1910) enjoyed financial security until the year following the poet’s graduation from high school, when tragedy struck both his mother and his father.

In 1921, a trusted member of the Hormel enterprise was found to have embezzled more than a million dollars from the company. As a result, the poet’s father lost his accumulated wealth. The more serious catastrophe, however, was the poet’s mother’s lung cancer, which caused excruciating pain from the fall of 1921 to her death on June 22, 1922. Eberhart, who was then eighteen, stayed out of college for a year to help take care of her. It was the most profound experience of the poet’s life, and it provided an impetus for his poetry and for his exploration of the meaning of suffering, what is real and unreal, the mystery of creation, and the place of the imagination in art.

Eberhart graduated from Dartmouth College in 1926. For a while, he worked as a floorwalker in a department store and as an advertising copywriter, and then shipped out as a deckhand on a tramp steamer going around the world. He jumped ship at Port Said, Egypt, and made his way to England. In 1927, he went to St. John’s College, Cambridge University, where he earned a second B.A. in 1929.

The following year, 1930-1931, he served as tutor to the son of King Prajadhipok of Siam. Upon his return to the United States, he became a graduate student at Harvard University but decided not to go on for his doctoral degree. He taught at St. Mark’s School from 1933 to 1940; during this time, he was responsible for bringing W. H. Auden as a guest member of the faculty for a month.

Eberhart and his wife, Helen Elizabeth Butcher, were married on August 29, 1941. The couple would have two children: Richard Butcher Eberhart, called Dikkon, and Margaret Ghormley Eberhart, called Gretchen.

After Dikkon’s birth, in 1942, the Eberharts moved to Florida, where the poet received a commission as lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve and served as a theoretical gunnery instructor. He was later transferred to the Aerial Free Gunnery Training Unit in Dam Neck, Virginia, where he wrote “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” in the summer of 1944.

The breakthrough in Eberhart’s career came with his appointment to the faculty of Dartmouth in 1956. He also taught each spring term at the University of Florida in Gainesville in addition to serving as poet-in-residence at Dartmouth. After Eberhart’s official retirement in 1970, he continued living in Hanover, New Hampshire, until his death at the age of 101 on June 9, 2005.

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