Winfield Townley Scott

Charles William Behlen (Independent Scholar - North America)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 30 Apr 1910
Died 28 Apr 1968
Activity 1930-1968

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Journalist
Letter-writer/ Diarist
Poet

Resources

Scott's Works

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Although Winfield Townley Scott belongs to that generation of American poets who were the first to inherit the Modernist legacies of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams—a generation which included John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser, and Delmore Schwartz—he ultimately allied himself with the pre-moderns; Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Like them, he excelled at dramatic monologue and literary portraiture. What Scott shared with the Moderns, primarily William Carlos Williams, was an ear tuned to the music of American speech.

Like his contemporaries Lowell and Bishop, Scott often sought a prosodic middle ground between fixed iambic meter and free verse. However, he avoided the stylistic eccentricities of

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1652 words

Citation: Behlen, Charles William. "Winfield Townley Scott". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 September 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3985, accessed 21 November 2024.]