Oblivion

Donald Justice studied at the universities of Miami, Iowa, and Stanford, and has taught at the universities of Missouri, Syracuse, and California at Irvine and the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa, where he exercised great influence on a whole generation of poets, including Mark Strand and Charles Wright. Justice currently teaches at the University of Florida. He has edited the Collected Poems of Weldon Kees. The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to his Selected Poems (1979) and he has won the Lamont Prize (1960) and the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, as well as grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. A noted translator of French writings, Justice has been influenced by French literature as well as by the American and British traditions. Justice's poems are generally short and ironic. A formalist, Justice moves with ease among a variety of verse forms. He sees life through the frame of a certain American survivalism; his sensibility is singular, yet representative of his time and culture.

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