Alfred Corn

American poet
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Also known as: Alfred Dewitt Corn III
Quick Facts
In full:
Alfred Dewitt Corn III
Born:
August 14, 1943, Bainbridge, Georgia, U.S.
Also Known As:
Alfred Dewitt Corn III

Alfred Corn (born August 14, 1943, Bainbridge, Georgia, U.S.) is an American poet known for meditative lyrics that show a mastery of traditional forms.

Corn was raised in Valdosta, Georgia, and attended Emory University (B.A., 1965) and Columbia University (M.A., 1970). In the 1970s he traveled throughout Europe and then returned to the United States to teach at various universities. He earned critical acclaim for his first volume of verse, All Roads at Once (1976). The poems in A Call in the Midst of the Crowd (1978) are all about New York City, notably the lengthy title poem.

Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), one of Corn’s best-known works, is a long semiautobiographical poem modeled after the Paradiso in Dante’s La divina commedia. Corn’s other verse collections included The Various Light (1980), An Xmas Murder (1987), and The West Door (1988). Autobiographies (1992) is best known for the long poem 1992, a memoir, while Stake (1999) contains poems written between 1972 and 1992. The poems in Contradictions (2002) range widely in subject and metrical form. Corn’s 11th poetry collection, Unions, was published in 2014.

Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
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Corn also wrote the novels Part of His Story (1997), about an American playwright who moves to London after his lover’s death from AIDS, and Miranda’s Book (2014), in which a novelist writes about his imprisoned niece. His other books included The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody (1997) and Arks and Covenants: Essays and Aphorisms (2017).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.