Discipline: Literature

John Curtis Underwood

Discipline: Literature
MacDowell Fellowships: 1919, 1920
John Curtis Underwood (1874-1949) was a poet and literary figure born in Rockford, Illinois. He graduated in 1896 from Trinity College. In November 1918, Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, awarded Underwood the Helen Haire Levinson prize for the best poem of the year for "The Song of the Cheochas." During his career Underwood published various books of poetry and literary criticism. His poems were published in Everybody's and Ainslee's Magazine. Some of his books are Trails End (1921), Americans (1912), The Iron Muse (1910), Interpreters (1939), Processionals (1915), Pioneers (1923), and Literature and Insurgency (1914). In the preface to his book, Literature and Insurgency, Underwood gives his opinion of American literature and ideas about what poetry should be. "Poetry that is real, that is fit to survive through the centuries, needs no defense. ..., it rises triumphant from each defeat to summon men and women to greater heights of aspiration, to greater intensities and charities of common humanity shared and exalted. Great poetry like all great literature is born of storm and stress in the individual or the community."