20th Century Literature and Modern Poetics

Timothy Materer is the author of James Merrill's Apocalypse (Cornell 2000), Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (Cornell 1995), Vortex: Pound, Eliot, Lewis (Cornell 1979), and Wyndham Lewis the Novelist (Wayne State University 1976); and he has edited two volumes of Ezra Pound's letters, Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis (New Directions and Faber 1985) and The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn (Duke 1991). He has received fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His publications include articles on T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. He wrote the annual chapters on Modern Poetry in American Literary Scholarship (Duke 1995-2000) and is the moderator of the James Merrill electronic discussion list. He has received Twentieth Century Literature's award for the best article of the year ("Occultism in Sylvia Plath," 1991), a Gold Chalk Graduate Teaching award (1996), a Big 12 Fellowship (2001), the Byler Distinguished Professor Award (2004), and Lambda Chi Alpha's "Professor of the Year" award (2006). With the cooperation of Washington University, he is constructing websites devoted to the poetry manuscripts of James Merrill. Currently he is teaching courses on modern authors for Osher Lifelong Learning. 

Materer is also a moderator for both the on-line James Merrill Discussion list and the T.S. Eliot Discussion list. He also regularly teaches courses in literature for Osher Adult Education at MU. Recently, his courses have been on Viriginia Woolf and Paul's Epistles, and he recently gave a lecture on the centenary of James Joyce's Ulysses.