The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford

Author:   James McWilliams
Publisher:   University of Arkansas Press
ISBN:  

9781682262795


Pages:   528
Publication Date:   01 July 2025
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford


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Overview

When twenty-nine-year-old Frank Stanford put three bullets in his chest on June 3, 1978, he ended a life that had been inextricably linked with poetry since childhood. Deeply influential but largely unknown outside his corner of the poetry world, this prodigy of the American South inspired a cult following that has kept his reputation and work flickering on the periphery of the American literary tradition ever since. The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford offers for the first time a comprehensive study of Stanford’s life and work, introducing to a broad readership poetry that remains both captivating to poets and, in its celebration of everyday experience over academic erudition, accessible to those who rarely read poetry. Stanford’s poems range from one line to his 15,263-line epic, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The vital thread running through all of his poetry is an ear for language that vies with Walt Whitman in its expansiveness and generosity. Stanford’s omnivorous attraction to vernacular, particularly Black and rural vernacular, centered on an admiration for the marginalized and eccentric. Blending the Southern Gothic of Faulkner and O’Connor with a racially egalitarian vision, his poetry thrives on the stories and traditions of the oppressed and forgotten. The themes that preoccupied Stanford’s prolific output—language, sex, death, class, geography, commercialism, surrealism, film, race—also preoccupied the poet in his daily life, which was marked by heavy drinking, philandering, mental instability, emotional abuse, and, through it all, an inveterate desire for beauty. Constantly attentive to this tension, biographer James McWilliams traces the short and painfully complicated life of this hidden talent who left a lifetime’s worth of poetry that, through its grounding in the mundane, achieved a vision of the transcendent.

Full Product Details

Author:   James McWilliams
Publisher:   University of Arkansas Press
Imprint:   University of Arkansas Press
ISBN:  

9781682262795


ISBN 10:   1682262790
Pages:   528
Publication Date:   01 July 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

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Reviews

""Texas State University historian McWilliams has written an impeccably researched, capacious, and probing biography of the enigmatic, neglected Southern poet... McWilliams closes with a devastating portrait of the brilliant, promiscuous, financially burdened 29-year-old spiraling out of control and, despite a film and his own small press that he ran with poet/lover C.D. Wright, he ended it all in 1978 with three shots to his chest. The full-throated biography fans have been yearning for."" --Kirkus Starred Review, April 2025


Author Information

James McWilliams is a writer and historian who teaches at Texas State University. His work has appeared in Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar, and Mississippi Review.

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