The Gamut
Encyclopedia
The Gamut is a student publication at Harvard University
devoted exclusively to poetry. Weekly meetings start with the reading aloud of published poems and continue on to the reading and discussion of student submissions. All poems are considered anonymously, and each must pass two rounds of voting in order to be published. Although the board of the magazine comprises only a few students, all Harvard undergraduates are welcome to participate in the editorial meetings.
To mark the publication of each new issue, The Gamut holds a public reading in which the poets published in that issue read their work. Beginning in the spring of 2006, the editors decided to reserve one half of each issue's content for the winning submission of an annual chapbook contest.
Traditionally, Harvard has been home to many of the most important American poets, including T. S. Eliot
, Robert Lowell
, John Brooks Wheelwright
, Wallace Stevens
, E. E. Cummings
and John Ashbery
. These days, poets associated with the University include Seamus Heaney
, Jorie Graham
and Peter Sacks. Poetry is also flourishing in the undergraduate community through the work of publications such as The Gamut and The Harvard Advocate
and popular haunts like the Woodberry Poetry Room and the Grolier Poetry Book Shop at Harvard.
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
devoted exclusively to poetry. Weekly meetings start with the reading aloud of published poems and continue on to the reading and discussion of student submissions. All poems are considered anonymously, and each must pass two rounds of voting in order to be published. Although the board of the magazine comprises only a few students, all Harvard undergraduates are welcome to participate in the editorial meetings.
To mark the publication of each new issue, The Gamut holds a public reading in which the poets published in that issue read their work. Beginning in the spring of 2006, the editors decided to reserve one half of each issue's content for the winning submission of an annual chapbook contest.
Traditionally, Harvard has been home to many of the most important American poets, including T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
, John Brooks Wheelwright
John Brooks Wheelwright
John Brooks Wheelwright was an American poet from a Boston Brahmin background. He belonged to the poetic avant garde of the 1930s and was a Marxist, a founder-member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the United States...
, Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
, E. E. Cummings
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...
and John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
. These days, poets associated with the University include Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
, Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham is an American poet. The U.S. Poetry Foundation suggests "She is perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation". She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position...
and Peter Sacks. Poetry is also flourishing in the undergraduate community through the work of publications such as The Gamut and The Harvard Advocate
The Harvard Advocate
The Harvard Advocate, the literary magazine of Harvard College, is the oldest continuously published college literary magazine in the United States. The magazine was founded by Charles S. Gage and William G. Peckham in 1866 and, except for a hiatus during the last years of World War II, has...
and popular haunts like the Woodberry Poetry Room and the Grolier Poetry Book Shop at Harvard.