Leonard Bacon, a poet, translator, critic, and professor, was born on May 26, 1887, in Solvay, New York, the son of Nathaniel Bacon and Helen Hazard. He grew up at his mother’s familial estate in Peace Dale, Rhode Island. He came from a family of Congregationalist ministers, including the clergymen relatives for which he was named: his great-grandfather, Reverend Leonard Bacon, a leader of the colonization movement in New Haven, and his grandfather, Leonard Woolsey Bacon. His parents enrolled him in 1898 at St. George’s School in Newport, where he spent seven years preparing to matriculate to Yale, following in the footsteps of his father and some twenty relatives. Five of his relatives served as members of the faculty.

His studies were interrupted in 1906 when a tubercular lesion was found on his left lung. He spent six months in an asylum in Switzerland and used the time to read the classics, including Racine, Corneille, and Yeats. He returned to Yale, where he served as one of the editors of the Yale literary magazine, which published several of his earliest poems. After graduating with a B.A. in 1909, Bacon worked briefly under his father’s direction on a rubber plantation in Nicaragua. That year, he published his first volume of poetry, The Scrannel Pipe, reinforcing his belief that he wanted to write poetry above all. Bacon received an instructorship at the University of California at Berkeley, mainly on the merits of his poetry. While he gained a larger readership, publishing poetry in Harper’s Weekly, he also translated Heroic Ballads of Servia and The Song of Roland. He married Martha Sherman Stringham in 1912, and the couple had three daughters.

Bacon enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant stationed in Washington, D.C.  After the war ended, he returned to his boyhood home in Peace Dale, Rhode Island to concentrate on his poetry. The success of his poem, Uleg Beg convinced Bacon to retire from teaching permanently. His numerous volumes of poetry include Day of Fire (Oxford University Press, 1943); Sunderland Capture and Other Poems(Harper & Brothers, 1940), which won the 1941 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Bullinger Bound and Other Poems (Harper & Brothers, 1938); The Goose on the Capitol (Harper & Brothers, 1936), a narrative poem about contemporary politics; Dream and Action (Harper & Brothers, 1934), a narrative poem about the life of Arthur Rimbaud; and Ulug Beg: An Epic Poem, Comic in Intention, in VII Cantos (Knopf, 1923). Bacon died at his ancestral estate in Peace Dale, Rhode Island, on January 1, 1954. He was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2024.

For additional reading:

Leonard Bacon Papers, Yale Peabody Museum. The collection consists of correspondence, writings, printed material, and other papers that document the life and work of the poet Leonard Bacon. Correspondence is both professional and personal and documents Bacon’s writing and publishing activities and his personal and family relationships. Writings include drafts and proofs for many of his published works, including Ulug Beg (1923), Lost Buffalo, and Other Poems (1930), The Furioso (1932), Dream and Action (1934), and Semi-Centennial (1939), as well as works translated by Bacon, such as Luis de Camões’s The Lusiads (1950). Printed material includes several boxes of printed versions of Bacon’s poetry and other writings, pamphlets, reprints, newspaper clippings, and ephemera collected by Bacon. Other papers include three scrapbooks documenting Bacon’s career from 1923 to 1946 and a small quantity of personal documents and photographs.