Robert Kelly (poet)

Robert Kelly (born September 24, 1935) is an American poet associated with the deep image group. He is the 2016-2017 Poet Laureate of Dutchess County, New York.

Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Jason and Margaret Rose Kelly née Kane, in 1935. He did his undergraduate studies at the City College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1955. He then spent three years at Columbia University.

Kelly has worked as a translator and teacher, most notably at Bard College, where he has worked since 1961. Kelly's other teaching positions have included Wagner College (1960–61), the University at Buffalo (1964), and the Tufts University Visiting Professor of Modern Poetry (1966–67). In addition, he has served as Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology (1971–72), Yale University (Calhoun College), University of Kansas, Dickinson College, and the University of Southern California.

Kelly is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College (1986–) and Co-Director of The Program in Written Arts. He is a Founding Member of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Kelly, on his influences: ″I want to say the names of the great teachers from whom I learned what I could, and still am learning. Coleridge. Baudelaire. Pound. Apollinaire. Virgil. Aeschylus. Dante. Chaucer. Shakespeare. Dryden. Lorca. Rilke. Hölderlin. Stevens. Stein. Duncan. Olson. Williams. Blackburn. I mention only the dead, the dead are always different, and always changing. I mention them more or less in the order of when they came along in my life to teach me.″

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