James Radcliffe Squires

Radcliffe Squires died in 1993 of an abdominal aneurysm at Ann Arbor University Hospital in Michigan at the age of 75. He outlived his wife, the former Eileen Mulholland, who died in 1976.

In the Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry, Poet David Mason wrote that "The mannered formality of his early verse has given way to poems that are powerfully evocative of travel as travail, a struggle for knowledge and insight in a world often mysteriously cruel...Squires has written about America, Greece, and Spain, and many of his best poems are unassumingly personal, such as the powerful sequence from Journeys (1983) in which, after the death of his wife in 1976, he faces the shattering prospect of a life without love."

Gardens of the World (1981) is generally considered to be Squires finest volume. Reviewing it in The Hudson Review, Dana Gioia wrote : "Nothing in Radcliffe Squires's first five books of poetry will have prepared readers for Gardens of the World. Somehow at the age of sixty-three, long after the point when most writers settle into comfortable repetition, this little-known poet has focused all of his talent into one stunning and original collection."

Allen Tate and His Work was first published in 1972. Squires compared the aim of Tate's diverse achievements as essayist, novelist, and poet, to a simple physics experiment in which students are taught the principles of pressure. Squires wrote: "The synergy of Allen Tate's poetry, fiction, and essays has had the aim of applying pressure—think of the embossed, bitterly stressed lines, his textured metaphors—until it brings up before our eyes a blanched parody of the human figure, which is our evil, the world's evil, so that we begin to long for God. That has seemed to him a worthwhile task to perform for modern man threatened by such fatal narcissism, such autotelic pride that he is in danger of disappearing into a glassy fantasy of his own concoction. We shall need his help for a long time to come.”

Squires produced a critical study of Robert Frost, a biography of Frederic Prokosch, and a pioneering volume about Robinson Jeffers. All earlier books on Jeffers had been written by people associated with the poet. Squires also authored one of the earliest in-depth studies of Allen Tate, Allen Tate: A Literary Biography (1971), and edited an important collection of essays, Allen Tate and His Work.

When Squires's Where the Compass Spins appeared in 1951, John Holmes commented in The New York Times that in writing about "his family, a football game, the movies, a subway ride...[Mr. Squires] lifts these things to unforgettable importance" Richard Eberhart, writing in The Kenyon Review, mentioned the poetry's "elegant sophistication... the moods of delicate and bitter poignancy, the sense of long regarded places, subtle relationships." Mr. Eberhart concluded: "He writes (one would almost say 'Keatsian' sometimes of him) with insight... and can rise... to tones reminiscent of Hart Crane." "

Radcliffe Squires (May 5, 1917 – February 14, 1993) was an American poet, writer, critic, and academic. He published several well-regarded books of poetry, as well as biographical and critical works which focused on highly acclaimed 20th-century writers.

Radcliffe Squires was born on May 5, 1917 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The son of a barber, he earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Utah in 1940. He served in the Navy during World War II, and completed his graduate studies after the war at the University of Chicago, where he received his master's degree and co-founded the literary magazine Chicago Review in 1946. He was awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1952. After teaching at Dartmouth College, Squires joined the University of Michigan as an instructor of English language and literature in 1952, where he began a long teaching career. Following his retirement in 1982, Squires continued to teach seminars for first-year students and remained active as an essayist and reviewer. His work appeared in various magazines, such as The New Republic, The Hudson Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. Squires was also the author of seven books of poetry, one novel, and numerous critical books and essays. He accepted an invitation to read a number of his poems for audio recording and historical preservation at the Library of Congress on April 18, 1977, as part of the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, sponsored by the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund. He served as the editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review.