Jean Garrigue

"Chopin, Keats and Proust were early powerful influences. So were mountains and water."
-Contemporary Author, Vol. 20, Gale Research

The Kenyon Review introduced Jean Garrigue's writing in 1941 in a group of nine poets. In 1944, her first collection appeared as Thirty-six Poems and a Few Songs in Five Young American Poets. She then wrote two collections of verse, The Ego and the Centaur in 1947 and The Monument Rose in 1953. Garrigue published a number of short stories, receiving the Kenyon Review first prize for one in 1944, and for a novella, The Animal Hotel, (1966). She also reviewed fiction for the New Republic. She taught at a number of leading universities including Bard College, Smith College, and The New School. She was Poet-in-Residence at colleges and universities, including University of California, Riverside in 1971 and visiting poet at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1970. She held a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to Paris in 1954 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960. Her other honors include a National Book Award nomination for Country Without Maps. Garrigue often wrote love poetry or poetry related to her extensive travels and nature. Among Garrigue's well-received works were her lengthy travel poems, For the Fountains and Fountaineers of Villa d'Este, Pays Perdu, and The Grand Canyon.

Education and Training
B.A., University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1937
M.A., University of Iowa, Iowa, 1943
Lived and traveled in Europe from 1953 to 1954, 1957 to 1958, and from 1962 to 1963

Teachers and Influences
In poetry, she was in search of a language taking its rhythm from living things and nature.
Josephine Herbst, writer, was a friend, and longtime companion.
Influenced in her early years by the Imagists
Of the English poets, she admired Wyatt, Coleridge, William Blake, Yeats, and Marsell

Connection to Bucks County
Jean Garrigue often visited the home of Josephine Herbst in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. They met in 1949-1950 when Garrigue was thirty-seven years old, and they maintained a life-long relationship. In the 1950s, Herbst's house in Erwinna was "becoming a stopping place for a group of young men and women just beginning to make their marks on the world." Jean Garrigue's prose novella Animal Hotel, first published in New World Writing in 1956, is an account of the young writers and intellectuals who visited or stayed at Herbst's farm in Erwinna in the 1950s. These writers liked to think of Erwinna as a source of inspiration and a spiritual home as compared to the drabness of city-life.
Garrigue was among them, her stays being as frequent as they were, because of her intimate relationship with Herbst. A relationship that "called forth voluminous writing, perhaps even as many as three thousand letters."

Novels and Short Stories
The Animal Hotel, 1966

Poetry
Five Young American Poets, 1944
The Ego and the Centaur, 1947, reprinted 1972
The Monument Rose, 1953
A Water Walk by Villa d'Este, 1959
Country Without Maps, 1964
New and Selected Poems, 1967
Studies for An Actress and Other Poems, 1973

Criticism and Essays
Marianne Moore, a critical study, 1965

Publications
Kenyon Review, Botteghe Oscure, Poetry, Tiger's Eye, Saturday Review, New Republic, New Leader, Commentary, Arts Magazine, New York Herald Tribune

Teaching and Professional Appointments
Instructor, English Literature, University of Iowa, 1942-1943;
Bard College, 1951-1952; Queens College, 1952-1953; New School for Social Research, 1955-1956; University of Connecticut, 1960-1961; Smith College, 1965-1966; University of Washington, University of California Riverside, Rhode Island College
Poet-in-Residence, University of California, Riverside, 1971
Visiting Poet, University of Washington, 1970

Major Awards
Rockefeller Grant, Creative Writing, 1954
Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Prize, 1956
Hudson Review Fellowship, for Poetry, 1957
Longview Award, 1959
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1960-1961
National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant, 1962
Emily Clark Balch First Prize, for Country Without Maps, 1966
Melville Cane Award, 1968

Affiliations and Memberships
Member of P.E.N., Poetry Society of America