Ruth Whitman, Poet, Former Radcliffe Seminars Instructor, Dies

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

December 09, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Ruth Whitman, poet and longtime Radcliffe Seminars instructor, died in Middletown, R.I., on Dec. 1 after a long illness. She was 77.

At a time when it was considered unseemly for a woman to have a career outside the home, she believed passionately that a woman could be a poet and a mother. As she wrote on the flyleaf of her first books of poems, Blood and Milk Poems, published in 1963, "Bearing a baby, writing a poem; both enter into life as beings not quite my own, but nourished by my blood and my milk."

Whitman published seven more books of poems, including her best known Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey, written in the voice of the 19^th-century woman pioneer who lost her life in the Wasatch mountains en route to California. For this work, Whitman traveled across the country in the footsteps of the Donner party. The book subsequently was choreographed as a dance performance by Julie Thompson, adapted as a PBS television script by Martha Hardy, and as a play by Martha and William Hardy.

Her other books of poems include Laughing Gas, Permanent Address, and Marriage Wig and Other Poems.

She was an influential teacher, mentor, and friend to many women who became well-known poets, such as Maxine Kumin, Rosellen Brown, and Linda Pastan. "Ruth’s criticism was gentle but firm, hopeful, and critical," commented Brown.

An instructor for many years at the Radcliffe Seminars, as well as at M.I.T., Whitman was named Radcliffe Seminars Distinguished Instructor in 1984.

Her numerous awards and honors include a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe College, where she received her B.A. and M.A. degrees, and a Fulbright Writer-in-Residence at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

From 1980 to 1995 she was the poetry editor of the Radcliffe Quarterly.

Whitman leaves her husband, Morton Sacks, a painter; three children, Rachel Whitman, Lee Whitman-Raymond, and David Houghton; and eight grandchildren. A memorial service will be held at the Radcliffe Seminars in the spring.