{{Short description|American literary critic and academic}} {{use mdy dates|date=February 2026}} {{Infobox writer <!-- For more information see :Template:Infobox Writer/doc. --> | name = Stephanie Burt | image = Stephanie Burt.jpg | image_size = | alt = Stephanie Burt headshot | caption = Burt in December 2018 | pseudonym = | birth_name = | birth_date = | birth_place = | death_date = <!-- {{Death date and age|YYYY|MM|DD|YYYY|MM|DD}} --> | death_place = | resting_place = | occupation = | language = English | ethnicity = | citizenship = | education = Georgetown Day School<br/>Harvard University (BA)<br/>Yale University (PhD) | alma_mater = | period = | genre = Literary criticism<br/>Poetry | subject = | movement = | notableworks = ''Randall Jarrell and His Age''<br/>"The New Things"<br/>"Elliptical poetry" | spouse = | partner = | children = | relatives = | awards = | signature = | signature_alt = | website = <!-- www.example.com --> | portaldisp = | module = {{Infobox academic | child=yes | title = Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English | thesis_title = Randall Jarrell and His Age | thesis_url = https://www.proquest.com/docview/304640435 | thesis_year = 2000 | doctoral_advisor = Langdon Hammer | academic_advisors = | influences = <!--must be referenced from a third party source--> | era = | discipline = English | sub_discipline = Poetry | workplaces = {{ublist|Macalaster College|Harvard University}} | doctoral_students = | notable_students = | main_interests = | notable_works = | notable_ideas = | influenced = <!--must be referenced from a third party source--> }} }}
'''Stephanie Burt''' (formerly published as '''Stephen Burt''') is an American literary critic and poet who is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://english.fas.harvard.edu/people/stephanie-burt|title=Stephanie Burt | Department of English|website=english.fas.harvard.edu}}</ref> ''The New York Times'' has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation".<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/stephen-burt-poetrys-cross-dressing-kingmaker.html|title=Poetry's Cross-Dressing Kingmaker|first=Mark|last=Oppenheimer|newspaper=The New York Times|date=Sep 14, 2012|access-date=May 1, 2021}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=https://harvardmagazine.com/2017/11/stephanie-burt-harvard|title="Kingmaker" to Gatekeeper|date=2017-10-06|work=Harvard Magazine|access-date=2017-12-04|language=en}}</ref> Burt grew up around Washington, D.C. She has published various collections of poetry and a large amount of literary criticism and research.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephanie-burt|title=Stephanie Burt|date=2019-10-08|website=Poetry Foundation|language=en|access-date=2019-10-08}}</ref> Her work has appeared in ''The New Yorker'', ''The New York Times Book Review'', ''The London Review of Books'', and other publications.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://blueflowerarts.com/artist/stephanie-burt/|title=Stephanie Burt|language=en-US|access-date=2019-10-08}}</ref><ref>{{Cite magazine |date=2022-06-16 |title=The Invention of the Trans Novel |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/27/the-invention-of-the-trans-novel-imogen-binnie-nevada |access-date=2022-06-21 |magazine=The New Yorker |language=en-US}}</ref>
==Literary criticism: new categories of contemporary poetry== ===Elliptical poetry=== Burt received significant attention for coining the term "elliptical poetry" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's book ''Smokes'' in ''Boston Review'' magazine: <blockquote>Elliptical poets try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-"postmodern": they have read (most of them) Stein's heirs, and the "language writers," and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively "poetic") diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning "I am an X, I am a Y." Ellipticism's favorite established poets are Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and/or Auden ... The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television.<ref name="auto1">{{Cite web|url=http://bostonreview.net/BR23.3/burt.html|title=Stephen Burt's Review of ''Smokes'' by Susan Wheeler|access-date=May 1, 2021|archive-date=February 7, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120207134623/http://bostonreview.net/BR23.3/burt.html|url-status=dead}}</ref></blockquote> Burt also adds that elliptical poets are "good at describing information overload".<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://bostonreview.net/BR23.3/burt.html|title=Stephanie Burt's Review of ''Smokes'' by Susan Wheeler|access-date=May 1, 2021}}</ref> In addition to calling the subject of her review, Susan Wheeler, an important elliptical poet, she also lists Liam Rector's ''The Sorrow of Architecture'' (1984), Lucie Brock-Broido's ''The Master Letters'' (1995), Mark Ford's ''Landlocked'' (1992), and Mark Levine's debut, ''Debt'' (1993) as "some groundbreaking and definitively Elliptical books."<ref name="auto1"/>
===The New Thing=== In 2009, she wrote "The New Things", an essay in which she posits a new category of American contemporary poets, which she calls "The New Thing". These poets derive their style from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Gertrude Stein, and George Oppen: <blockquote>The poets of the New Thing observe scenes and people (not only, but also, themselves) with a self-subordinating concision, so much so that the term "minimalism" comes up in discussions of their work ... The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit ... The new poetry, the new thing, seeks, as Williams did, well-made, attentive, unornamented things. It is equally at home (as he was) in portraits and still lifes, in epigram and quoted speech; and it is at home (as he was not) in articulating sometimes harsh judgments, and in casting backward looks. The new poets pursue compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and—despite their frequent skepticism—fidelity to a material and social world. They follow Williams’s "demand", as the critic Douglas Mao put it, "both that poetry be faithful to the thing represented and that it be a thing in itself." They are so bound up with ideas of durable thinghood that we can name the tendency simply by capitalizing: the New Thing. . . Reference, brevity, self-restraint, attention outside the self, material objects as models, Williams and his heirs as predecessors, classical lyric and epigram as precedents: all these, together, constitute the New Thing.<ref name="auto">Burt, Stephen. "The New Thing", ''Boston Review''. May/June 2009.</ref></blockquote>
Poets whom she cites as examples of "The New Thing" include Rae Armantrout, Michael O'Brien, Justin Marks, Elizabeth Treadwell, and Graham Foust.<ref name="auto"/>
==Writings== In addition to her essays for the ''Boston Review'', Burt has written for ''The New Yorker,'' ''The New York Times Book Review'', ''Poetry Review'', ''Slate'', ''The Times Literary Supplement'', the ''London Review of Books'', and the ''Yale Review''.
She has a particular interest in the work of the poet/critic Randall Jarrell, and Burt's book ''Randall Jarrell and His Age'' reevaluates Jarrell's importance as a poet. The book won the Warren-Brooks Award in 2002. In explaining her book's aim, Burt wrote, "Many readers know Jarrell as the author of several anthology poems (for example, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"), a charming book or two for children, and a panoply of influential reviews. This book aims to illuminate a Jarrell more ambitious, more complex, and more important than that."<ref>Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. </ref> In 2005, she also edited ''Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden'', a collection of Jarrell's critical essays.
In addition to writing about poets and poetry, Burt has published four books of her own poetry, ''Popular Music'' (1999), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, ''Parallel Play'' (2006), ''Belmont'' (2013) ''Advice From The Lights'' (2017), and ''We are Mermaids'' (2022).
On occasion, she has been known to write for a popular audience on ''Slate'' and for ''The New Yorker'', including an article about ''X-Men: Days of Future Past'' in the voice of Kitty Pryde.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://slate.com/culture/2014/05/kitty-pryde-reviews-x-men-days-of-future-past.html|title=Kitty Pryde Has Some Notes on the New X-Men Movie|first=Stephanie|last=Burt|date=May 23, 2014|website=Slate Magazine|access-date=May 1, 2021}}</ref>
== Career== Burt earned an AB from Harvard University in 1994 and a PhD from Yale University in 2000 before joining the faculty at Macalester College from 2000 to 2007. Since 2007, she has worked at Harvard University, where she became a tenured professor in 2010. In 2023, she was named the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English.
In July 2022, Burt began an actual play podcast with Fiona Hopkins named Team up moves.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://teamupmoves.com/|title=Team-Up Moves: Superhero RPG Podcast|website=teamupmoves.com}}</ref> On it, they play various superhero based role-playing games and currently have 13 episodes and 2 seasons, although the show has been on hiatus since August 2023.
In the Spring 2024 semester, Burt taught a course at Harvard University called "Taylor Swift and Her World", an English course surrounding the musical works of American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. The course was met with widespread fame, enrolling almost 200 Harvard College undergraduate students, surpassing Burt's belief that she'd end up teaching the course as a seminar to about 20 students.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/taylor-swift-harvard-class|title=I Taught the Taylor Swift Class at Harvard. Here’s My Thesis|first=Stephanie|last=Burt|date=June 26, 2024|website=Vanity Fair}}</ref>
==Personal life== Burt is a transgender woman and uses ''she/her'' and ''they/them'' pronouns.<ref name="Harvard Gazette 2017">{{cite web | title=Stephanie Burt opens up {{!}} Professor discusses new book of poetry, life as trans woman ahead of Diversity Dialogues talk | website=Harvard Gazette |first=Jill |last=Radsken|date=3 November 2017 | url=https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/11/harvard-poet-stephanie-burts-new-volume-explores-gender-memory/ | access-date=4 December 2017}}</ref> She has since been active in LGBTQA+ rights and awareness campaigns.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-oppenheimer-steph-burt-dialogue-20170706-story.html|title=Op-Ed: A Harvard poet who came out as trans shows what patient tolerance looks like|first=Mark |last=Oppenheimer| date=2017-07-06|website=Los Angeles Times|language=en-US|access-date=2019-10-08}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://forward.com/life/376274/stephanie-burt-harvard-english-scholar-discusses-her-transition-read-her-le/|title=Stephanie Burt, Harvard English Scholar, Discusses Her Transition|date=7 July 2017|access-date=19 October 2024}}</ref>
==Bibliography== {{Incomplete list|date=October 2015}}{{bots|deny=Citation bot}}
===Poetry=== ;Collections * {{cite book |author=Burt, Stephen |title=Popular music |location=Fort Collins |publisher=Center for Literary Publishing/University Press of Colorado |date=1999 <!--|isbn = 9780870815553| oclc = 636772523-->}} * {{cite book |author=Burt, Stephen |author-mask=1 |title=Parallel play |location=Minneapolis |publisher=Graywolf Press |date=2006 <!--|isbn=9781555974374}} |OCLC=62938522-->}} * {{cite book |author=Burt, Stephen |author-mask=1 |title=Belmont |location=Minneapolis |publisher=Graywolf Press |date=2013 <!--|isbn=9781555976446 |oclc=938140954-->}} * {{cite book |author=Burt, Stephen |author-mask=1 |title=Advice from the lights : poems |location=Minneapolis |publisher=Graywolf Press |date=2017 <!--|isbn=9781555977894-->}} * {{cite book |author=Burt, Stephanie |title=After Callimachus : poems |publisher=Princeton University Press |date=2020 <!--isbn=9780691180199-->}} * {{cite book |author=Burt, Stephanie |author-mask=1 |title=For all mutants |publisher=Rain Taxi |date=2021}} * {{cite book |author=Burt, Stephanie |author-mask=1 |title=We Are Mermaids: Poems |location=Minneapolis |publisher=Graywolf Press |date=2022 <!--|isbn=9781644452059-->}}
;List of poems {|class='wikitable sortable' width='90%' |- !width=25%|Title !|Year !|First published !|Reprinted/collected |- |Hermit crab |2013 |{{cite journal |author=Burt, Stephen |date=August 5, 2013 |title=Hermit crab |journal=The New Yorker |volume=89 |issue=23 |pages=28 |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/05/hermit-crab <!--|access-date=2016-12-19-->}} | |- |Ice for the ice trade |2015 |{{cite journal |author=Burt, Stephen |date=November 23, 2015 |title=Ice for the ice trade |journal=The New Yorker |volume=91 |issue=37 |pages=90–91 |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/ice-for-the-ice-trade <!--|access-date=2022-06-15-->}} | |}
===Literary criticism=== * ''Randall Jarrell and His Age'' (Columbia University Press, 2002) * ''Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden'' (Columbia University Press, 2005) * ''[https://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14142-0/the-forms-of-youth The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence]'' (Columbia University Press, 2007) * ''Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry'' (Graywolf Press, 2009) * ''The Art of the Sonnet''.(2010) Harvard University Press (co-authored with David Mikics) {{ISBN|978-0674061804}} * {{cite journal |author=Burt, Stephen |authorlink= |author-mask= |date=Mar–Apr 2013 |title=Chris Van Hollen |department= |journal=The Believer |volume=11 |issue=3 |pages=44–45}} * ''From There: Some Thoughts on Poetry & Place''. (2016) Ronsdale Press {{ISBN|978-1553804611}} * ''The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them''. (2016) Harvard University Press {{ISBN|978-0674737877}} * {{cite journal |author=Burt, Stephanie |author-mask= |date=Dec 2017 – Jan 2018 |title=Run-of-the-mill sticks, run-of-the mill stakes |department=Symposium |journal=The Believer |volume=14 |issue=3 |pages=100–102}} * {{cite book |author=Burt, Stephanie |author-mask=1 |title=Don't read poetry : a book about how to read poems |publisher=Basic Books |date=2019 <!--|isbn=9780465094509-->}} * {{cite journal |author=Burt, Stephanie |author-mask=1 |date=February 15–22, 2021 |title=Flame on : we all live in Stan Lee's universe. How much of it did he create? |department=The Critics. Books |journal=The New Yorker |volume=97 |issue=1 |pages=70–74 |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/15/who-really-created-the-marvel-universe <!--|access-date=2025-01-04-->}}<ref group=lower-alpha>Online version is titled "Who really created the Marvel universe?".</ref> ——————— ;Bibliography notes {{reflist|40em|group=lower-alpha}}
==References== {{Reflist}}
==External links== {{Commons category|Stephanie Burt}} * [http://www.closecallswithnonsense.com/ Burt's personal website] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130617061610/http://www.closecallswithnonsense.com/ |date=2013-06-17 }} * [https://bostonreview.net/articles/stephen-burt-review-smokes/ Burt's Boston Review essay introducing "Elliptical poetry"] * [https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-new-thing-the-object-lessons-of-recent-american-poetry-stephen-burt/ Burt's Boston Review essay on "The New Thing"] * Plunkett, Adam, [https://newrepublic.com/article/114900/stephen-burts-belmont-reviewed-poetrys-most-indiscriminate-fanboy "The Poetry World's Most Indiscriminate Fanboy"], ''The New Republic'', October 26, 2013 * {{TED speaker}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Burt, Stephen}} Category:American literary critics Category:American women literary critics Category:The Believer (magazine) people Category:Harvard University alumni Category:The New Yorker people Category:Yale University alumni Category:Living people Category:Transgender women writers Category:American transgender writers Category:American people of Jewish descent Category:Transgender academics Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Macalester College faculty Category:1971 births Category:American LGBTQ women writers Category:Georgetown Day School alumni