Robert Fitzgerald Biography Quotes 23 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald, known to readers simply as Robert Fitzgerald, was an American poet, critic, and translator whose life bridged the worlds of modern letters and classical antiquity. Born in 1910 in the United States, he grew up with a strong command of language and an early fascination with the Greek and Latin classics. At Harvard University he studied literature and languages with uncommon intensity, laying the groundwork for the vocation that would define him: bringing the works of Homer, Virgil, and the Greek dramatists into supple, living English for a modern audience.

Emerging Poet and Journalist
After university, Fitzgerald supported himself through journalism and literary work in New York, a training that honed the clarity, rhythm, and economy for which his prose and verse are remembered. From early on he wrote poems and essays alongside his translations, cultivating a public voice that was exacting without being fussy. He moved easily among poets, critics, and editors, and he maintained friendships that would matter for decades. One of the most significant was with James Agee, a fellow writer of his generation. Their correspondence and shared commitments to craft and moral seriousness helped shape Fitzgerald's standards as he matured from a promising young poet into a major translator and critic.

Translator of Homer and Virgil
Fitzgerald's reputation rests above all on his verse translations of the central epics of Western literature. His Odyssey brought Homer's storytelling and musical cadences into spare, lucid English that felt both classical and contemporary. Years later he undertook the Iliad, rendering its swift narrative, formal dignity, and martial thunder with line-by-line care and a poet's ear. Near the end of his life he turned to the Aeneid, long a touchstone for his sense of the Latin tradition. That version, completed in the early 1980s, combined accuracy with a readable, flexible measure, and it quickly found a home in classrooms and private libraries alike. For generations of students and general readers, the names Homer and Virgil became inseparable from the versions signed by Robert Fitzgerald.

Greek Drama and Collaboration with Dudley Fitts
Long before he completed the trilogy of epic translations, Fitzgerald had already helped reshape the English-speaking world's encounter with classical drama. With the poet and teacher Dudley Fitts he collaborated on versions of Sophocles and other Greek playwrights that entered the repertory of American schools and theaters. Those translations, at once restrained and energetic, taught readers how to hear the tragic line in English without losing the integrity of the originals. The Fitts, Fitzgerald partnership exemplified a method that would define Fitzgerald's approach throughout his career: respect for the letter of the text combined with an ear for living speech.

Friendships, Family, and Flannery O'Connor
Fitzgerald's private and professional worlds intertwined fruitfully. His marriage to Sally Fitzgerald, an exacting editor and gifted literary presence in her own right, anchored a household of conversation, manuscripts, and enduring friendships. Sally's editorial work, especially on the letters and writings of Flannery O'Connor, made the Fitzgerald home a haven for one of the most important American fiction writers of the twentieth century. O'Connor spent a period living with the Fitzgeralds while managing illness and transition, and the bond among them was one of hospitality, literary counsel, and mutual encouragement. These relationships formed a living network around Robert Fitzgerald's writing, reinforcing his belief that literature is a shared civic and moral enterprise.

Teaching and Editorial Work
Fitzgerald taught at American universities, including a long association with Harvard, where he helped generations of students read, scan, and hear poetry with attentiveness to tone and measure. He was a demanding but humane teacher, attentive to the discipline of craft and to the ethical demands of translation. In the classroom he stressed that fidelity to a source text requires more than literalness; it asks for intelligence about form, tradition, and the implicit music of the original language. Beyond teaching, he wrote essays and introductions that clarified his principles, and he served in editorial roles that brought new writing to print while setting a high bar for clarity and taste.

Later Years and Legacy
In his final years Fitzgerald gathered poems composed across decades and saw through major translation projects, including his Aeneid. He died in the mid-1980s, having completed a body of work that bridged scholarship and art. His versions of Homer and Virgil remain among the most widely read in English, praised for their combination of accuracy, composure, and unobtrusive lyric power. The Greek plays he translated with Dudley Fitts continue to be staged and assigned, models of how to transmit a tragic voice into a different tongue without flattening its force. Through the example of his marriage to Sally Fitzgerald and their friendship with Flannery O'Connor, his life also testified to a literary culture grounded in hospitality, criticism, and care. As a poet, teacher, and translator, Robert Stuart Fitzgerald left a durable imprint on American letters: he taught readers not only what the classics say, but how they move, sound, and mean in a living language.

Our collection contains 23 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Music - Writing - Learning - Art - Poetry.

Other people realated to Robert: Robin Williams (Comedian)