J.V. Cunningham

James Vincent Cunningham (August 23, 1911 – March 30, 1985) was an American poet, literary critic and teacher.

Cunningham is described as a neo-classicist or anti-modernist, his poetry was distinguished by its clarity, brevity and traditional formality of rhyme and rhythm at a time when many American poets were breaking away from traditional fixed meters.

Cunningham's finely crafted epigrams in the style of Latin poets were much praised and frequently anthologized. But he also wrote spare, mature poems about love and estrangement, most notably the 15-poem sequence entitled To What Strangers, What Welcome (1964).

Cunningham was also a fine translator with a lifelong interest therein.

Cunningham was born in Cumberland, Maryland in 1911, the son of Irish Catholic parents. His father, James Joseph Cunningham, was a steam-shovel operator for a railroad who moved the family to Billings, Montana, and later to Denver, Colorado where Cunningham spent his youth. His mother was Anna Finan Cunningham. Cunningham graduated from Regis High School in Denver 1927 at age fifteen, showing great skills in Latin and Greek. In high school, he first corresponded with Yvor Winters who was then a graduate student at Stanford University and who later became an influential poet and critic.

The death of Cunningham's father in an accident and the family's resulting financial hardship prevented Cunningham from continuing immediately to college. He worked for a while as a "runner" for a brokerage house on the Denver Stock Exchange, where he personally witnessed two suicides in the days immediately following the October 29, 1929 stock market crash.

With the onset of the Great Depression, he rode the rails from odd job to odd job, throughout the Western United States, including stints as a local newspaper reporter and a writer for trade publications such as Dry Goods Economist. In 1931, Cunningham again struck up a correspondence with Winters who offered him the opportunity to stay in a shed on Winters' property and to attend classes at Stanford University where Winters was teaching. Cunningham earned an A.B. in classics in 1934 and a Ph.D. in English in 1945—both from Stanford.

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