Craft: David Ferry

This essay was written in collaboration with Arden Levine.

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David Ferry (1924-2023) wrote some very fine poems and led a life in poetry for nearly a century. His poems perhaps were overshadowed by the achievement of his translations—The Epic of Gilgamesh, Horace’s Odes, and Virgil’s Eclogues. 

Ferry taught at Wellesley College from 1952 until his retirement in 1989. Thereafter, he was a fixture in Cambridge and Brookline, Massachusetts, and lived in the house formerly occupied by the women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller.

Ferry: “I wish I could recall now the lines written across the surface of my dreams.”

A master craftsman of language, Ferry’s poems were simultaneously gentle and solid: he could demonstrate architectural fortitude of text with the lightest touch, by moving from pianissimo to piano.