Belitt was born on May 2, 1911, in New York City to Lewis and Ida Belitt. He spent the first ten years of his life in an orphanage and then moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, after his mother and her second husband reconnected with him. He received two degrees from the University of Virginia, and was a doctoral candidate from 1934 until 1936 but never completed the degree. He began his career at Bennington in 1938, and while there influenced a number of well-known poets, including Susan Wheeler, Reginald Shepherd, and Lynn Emanuel.
His own work is not easily located within the predominant contemporary schools. It is known for a quality of riotous sound, what Wheeler has called “a gorgeous, guttural English,” as in these lines from his poem “On Quaking Bog”: Night-sweat clotted their palms. They tasted
their gall. The sumac flickered a swatch
of its leaves in the lichens and venoms …
Critics have also noted Belitt’s embrace of both scholarly references and earthy detail, and have described the way his poetry creates meaning through a nonlinear accretion of pattern or form, or in Howard Nemerov’s words, the way “in which the meaning of the poem is gained not from reading through it so much as from reading around in it.” Similarly, the succession of his published books indicates a circular movement through chosen themes, with the work examining the same concerns again and again from different points of view.
Belitt’s work is praised for its tonal range, with one often-explored register being an elegiac intensity that one critic has said represents an “insistence upon connection, meaning, and wholeness.” His work was often autobiographically based, but in its density and its attention to sound, it attempted to reach a level well beyond the quotidian—as Shepherd puts it, “to write for the past and for the future which one will no longer inhabit though one hopes that one’s poems will.”
As a translator, Belitt sometimes was criticized for favoring the coherence of the translation over a strict adherence to the original. Although he won many awards in his lifetime, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1946) and National Endowment for the Arts (1967–1968) and American Academy of Arts and Letters (1981) awards, many of his admirers consider him to be under-represented in anthologies and in the twentieth-century canon generally. He also published poetry and criticism in a number of journals, including the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Nation, and Harper’s.
A lifelong bachelor, Belitt died at age 92, on August 17, 2003, in Bennington.
Major Works
Poetry
- The Five-Fold Mesh (1938)
- Wilderness Stair (1955)
- The Enemy Joy: New and Selected Poems (1964)
- Nowhere but Light: Poems, 1964–1969 (1970)
- Adam’s Dream: A Casebook on Translation (1977)
- The Double Witness: Poems, 1970–1976 (1977)
- Adam’s Dream: A Preface to Translation (1978)
- Possessions (1938–1985) (1986)
- Graffiti (1989)
- This Scribe, My Hand: The Complete Poems of Ben Belitt (1998)
Translations
- Lorca, Federico García, Poet in New York: A Bilingual Edition (1955)
- Neruda, Pablo, The Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda (1961)
- Guillen, Jorge, Cantico (edited by N. T. DiGiovanni; 1965)
- Neruda, Pablo, Poems from the Canto General (1968)
- Neruda, Pablo, A New Decade: Poems, 1958–1967 (with Alastair Reid; 1969)
- Alberti, Rafael, A la Pintura (1972)
- Neruda, Pablo, New Poems: 1968–1970 (1972)
- Neruda, Pablo, Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta (1972)
- Borges, Jorge Luis, Selected Poems (edited by N. T. DiGiovanni; 1972)
- Neruda, Pablo, Five Decades: Poems, 1925–1970 (1974)
- Neruda, Pablo, Skystones translation of Las Piedras del Cielo (1981)
- Lorca, Federico García, The New York Poems: Poet in New York/Earth and Moon (1982)
- Neruda, Pablo, Late and Posthumous Poems, 1968–1974 (introduction by Manuel Duran; 1988)
Essays
- Four Poems by Rimbaud: The Problem of Translation (1947)
- The Forgèd Feature: Toward a Poetics of Uncertainty, New and Selected Essays (1995)
