Susan Stewart, the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, professor of English, and member of the Department of Art and Archaeology’s associated faculty — a poet, critic, and translator — transferred to emeritus status on July 1, 2023. In her nineteen years at the University, she has taught undergraduate and graduate students in classes on topics from the nature of poetry to the work of Wallace Stevens to the history of criticism. She has advised many senior theses and directed twenty-three doctoral dissertations; her students work, teach, and write around the world. She served as the director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts from 2010 to 2017, encouraging the studies of promising young scholars from the widest array of humanist (and some scientific) disciplines. Many poets have flourished under her attentions as editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets since 2013. Her support and guidance of underprivileged students in academia has been a lifelong cause.

Susan was born in Pennsylvania in 1952. Her parents both attended one-room country schoolhouses. Her father became an agricultural expert with undergraduate and graduate degrees from state universities; her mother completed her education, high school and community college, much later, in her seventies. Both read aloud to their daughter, and when Susan began to read for herself, an alert teacher arranged for her to borrow as many books from the school library as she liked. Another, in Sunday school, led her and her classmates through Paradise Lost. When she went off to college, it was to Dickinson, where she completed her B.A. in three years, majoring in English and minoring in anthropology. She went on from there to the University of Pennsylvania, completing her Ph.D. in folklore and folklife studies in 1978, after five years of study interleaved with an M.A. in poetry from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, in 1974-75. She went to teach in the English department at Temple University in 1978, where she helped found the creative writing program and annual Rome seminars in aesthetics. In 1997 she became the Regan Professor in English back at the University of Pennsylvania.

At Princeton, Susan was the Annan Professor of English from 2004 to 2010 before assuming the Avalon chair.

Susan’s range of degrees, in English, poetry, and folklore, has been reflected in the range of her publications since the beginning of her academic career. She has alternated books of criticism and of poetry, and as of this writing, there are seven of each. Her first book of criticism, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), brings a curiosity shaped by structuralist anthropology to the senses of senseless speech, across writing from nursery rhymes to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Her second, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), translated now into several languages, has been an ongoing resource for visual artists inspired by its attention to feelings about objects. (Collaboration with artists, including Ann Hamilton, William Kentridge, and Eve Aschheim, continues to inform her work across all of her genres, as it has informed her teaching.) The next book was Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford University Press, 1991), and then came Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which won both the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism and the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa.

Four books of poems appeared over these years, Yellow Stars and Ice (Princeton University Press, 1981), The Hive (University of Georgia Press, 1987), The Forest (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Columbarium (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the poems, as in the criticism, there is a deep knowledge of canonical literary history, never to be distinguished from daily familiarity with songs and spells and rhymes. Susan finds her forms in both places and in many languages and traditions. The poems have engaged not only visual artists, but also musicians, with many set by her frequent collaborator the late composer James Primosch. Their work included the song cycles “Songs for Adam,” commissioned by the Chicago Symphony, and “A Sibyl,” commissioned by Collage New Music in 2015 and performed by the Juilliard Orchestra at MOMA in the summer of 2017.

Since arriving at Princeton, Susan has continued her practice of alternating books. Of poems, there have been Red Rover (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Cinder: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2017). Translations have regularly interrupted the pattern, including Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini (Princeton University Press, 2009). Of criticism, Chicago published a collection of her writing on art, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (2005), along with The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (2011), and, most recently, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2020). She has said of the last, “Ruins always compel us to read their shapes and histories and to gather our thoughts, to question the past and to ask ourselves what we might value from the past.” That gathering took place over many years of teaching and research in Rome and explorations of ruined sites throughout the world, but began with playing in an abandoned farmhouse as a child.

The countless scenes of conversation and making inspired by Susan’s writing have been recognized by a long list of public honors and invitations, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. She has been a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2014), a visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome (2001), a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2005-2011), and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005-present), among many distinguished residencies, visiting positions, and memberships. She holds honorary doctorates from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (2013) and from her alma mater, Dickinson College (1998). The University gave her its Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities in 2014, and this May she will give Oxford University’s Clarendon Lectures, the most distinguished in the field.

Along the way, Susan, who has been married since 1973 to labor lawyer Daniel Halevy, has traveled widely to speak and read, including an extended lecture and reading tour through China in 2013 that inspired a reciprocal visit by many Chinese poets to Princeton in 2017. She has been active as a volunteer, whether working in national elections or local community groups, in adult literacy programs or as a poet in the schools. She is also a dedicated amateur printmaker.

Susan has said that “the only position I am interested in taking as a poet is that of making a commitment to constantly beginning anew.” In The Poet’s Freedom, she affirms “the freedom involving making without prior rules.” A grateful department congratulates her on this latest of her beginnings.

Written by members of the Department of English faculty.