Edward McCrorie is a Professor Emeritus of English at Providence College in Providence, RI. He is the author of six collections of poetry and three verse translations of epics by Virgil and Homer.
Biography
He was educated in local schools in Rhode Island and spent two and one half years at Our Lady of Providence Seminary in Warwick Neck, Rhode Island. From 1955 to 1959 he served with the U.S. Navy as an aircraft electrician, visiting ports in England and Greece.
He then resumed his education at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduating in 1962, and a masters of arts in English from Villanova University in 1964.
He began his career as an English Professor at Providence College in September 1964, and continued graduate work at Brown University, earning the Ph.D. in the spring of 1970.
He had married his first wife, Therese McNeil of Central Falls, Rhode Island in the summer of 1959. The two had four daughters over the years, Jeanne, Julia, Joyce and Cynthia.
He began publishing short poems in many literary journals in 1969 and saw his first book into print, After a Cremation, in 1974.
Brief translations of Virgil's Aeneid in that first book led to further experiments. Encouraged by Robert Bly and William Arrowsmith, among others, he published a verse translation of Virgil's epic in its entirety in 1991. This Collector's Edition from Donald Grant Press having won wide acclaim, the University of Michigan Press followed with a trade and a paperback edition.
He traveled widely and wrote more in Costa Rica, Europe and China, leading to the publication of his second book of poems, Needle Man, in 1999, with BrickHouse Books Press. Acupuncture was a principal focus in this work.
He was soon promoted through the ranks at Providence College as a result primarily of his poetry and translations. In fact an esteemed colleague, Rodney Delasanta, by this time a nationally reputed Chaucerian, convinced his colleagues on the Rank and Tenure Committee that the publication of a single exceptional poem was worth ten good scholarly articles.
Until this time his poetry had focused on family and social issues, its style lyrical and occasionally narrative. The election of George W. Bush to the U.S. Presidency in the fall of 2000, however, followed by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, drastically changed McCrorie's outlook, his whole political and literary orientation. Concerned with dramatizing essential American values, he began a story in verse called Washington's Night, depicting the psychological, political and military pressures on George Washington in December 1776, and culminating in his victory at the Battle of Trenton on December 26. America, the poem makes clear, stresses not only military power, but the longing for political freedom and especially a fundamental fairness, the justice for which the nation has become famous.
He was greatly helped in all this by his second marriage. Beatrice Beebe, whose work in New York City had explored mother-infant communication, and whose psychoanalytic practice had established her firmly in that field, was galvanized, like her husband, by the events of September 11. Her struggle to help the mothers and children who had lost their men that day would prove invaluable to her patients and, in time, to McCrorie.
But first, after a ten-year effort assisted by many Greek scholars, notably the late William Wyatt of Brown University, he published a verse translation of Homer's Odyssey with The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2004. In all his translations he persisted with the idea of close approximation: not only the sense but the sound of Homer's Greek he attempted to capture in English verse. Responses to this work were highly favorable; he would soon go on to Homer's Iliad.
Before then, the death of his mother prompted a number of poems in McCrorie's next book, published in 2010 by BrickHouse Books and called Gone Games. Childhood play also connects to this title, as do romances that come and go in one's adult life.