Richard Tillinghast

Richard Tillinghast (born 1940 in Memphis, Tennessee) is a poet and author.

Richard Tillinghast is a native of Memphis, Tennessee, a graduate of Sewanee (BA, 1962) and Harvard (MA, 1963; PhD, 1970). He has taught at Harvard as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, at the University of California at Berkeley, in the college program at San Quentin Prison, at Sewanee, The Poets' House in Ireland, The University of Michigan, and the low-residency MFA program at Converse College.

Tillinghast has published twelve books of poetry and a book of translations from Turkish, as well as four non-fiction books: Damaged Grandeur, a critical memoir of the poet Robert Lowell, with whom he studied as a graduate student at Harvard University in the mid-1960s; Poetry and What Is Real (2004), a selection of his critical writings about poetry; and Finding Ireland: a Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture (2008), an introduction to the country through its literature, architecture, history, and art. In 2012 he published a travel book, An Armchair Traveller's History of Istanbul, which takes a similar approach to the Turkish and Byzantine city where Tillinghast has spent considerable time for over fifty years. This book attempts to do for the city of Istanbul what "Finding Ireland" did for Ireland. It is an introduction to the imperial city through its history, art, architecture, religion, cuisine, etc., framed as a memoir of Tillinghast's many visits to the Turkish city beginning when he was a graduate student.

His fifth nonfiction book, Journeys into the Mind of the World, was published in 2017 by the University of Tennessee Press. Like Finding Ireland and An Armchair Traveller's History of Istanbul, Journeys is a book about place—or more specifically, places, ranging as it does among countries and cities where he has lived and traveled: his native city of Memphis and the state of Tennessee; Ireland; Venice; Iran, Afghanistan and India; London; the western United States; and Hawaii.

His most recent poetry collections are The New Life (2008),Selected Poems (2009), Sewanee Poems (2009), and Wayfaring Stranger (2012). Three other recent books of poetry are Six Mile Mountain (2000), Story Line Press, The Stonecutter's Hand (1995), David R. Godine, and Today in the Cafe Trieste (1997), new and selected poems issued by Salmon Publishing in Ireland.

In 1997 he also edited A Visit to the Gallery, a collection of poems written in response to paintings at the Museum of Art at the University of Michigan. For twenty years he reviewed new poetry for the New York Times Book Review and has also written frequently for The Irish Times. He has also reviewed and written literary essays for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New Criterion, as well as writing travel articles for the Times.

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