Title: Babette Deutsch Papers (MSS034), 1921-1969
Administrative/Biographical History
Babette Deutsch (September 22, 1895 – November 13, 1982) was an American poet, translator, novelist, editor, and critic. Born in New York City, Deutsch attended the Ethical Culture School and Barnard College, graduating in 1917 with a B.A. She published poems in magazines such as the North American Review and the New Republic while she was still a student at Barnard. Two years after her graduation, she published her first poetry collection, Banners (1919). Aligned with the Imagist movement, Deutsch typically composed compact, lyrical pieces using crisp visual imagery. Many of her poems are responses to paintings or other pieces of visual art. Deutsch is the author of 10 collections of poetry, two of which are self-selected volumes of her collected work: Collected Poems 1919–1962 (1963) and The Collected Poems of Babette Deutsch (1969). Deutsch also published four novels, six volumes of children’s literature, four books of prose on poetry, and numerous translations, and edited Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1967). With her husband, Avraham Yarmolinsky, Deutsch translated Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Alexander Blok’s The Twelve, edited several anthologies of Russian and German poetry, and compiled two story collections for children. Deutsch taught at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University, where she also received an honorary doctorate in 1946.
