Hayden Carruth

(1921 - 2008)

The editor of Poetry magazine from 1949 to 1950, Hayden Carruth lived much of his life in what his friends called “voluntary poverty.” Following hospitalization for alcoholism and mental illness, in 1953 Carruth moved to northern Vermont and worked as a farm laborer. “I had always been aware that the universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars,” he wrote. “I knew that the only rest from my anxiety—for I had been trembling even in infancy—lay in acknowledging and absorbing this sadness.”