Jonathan Aldrich was born on January 22, 1936, and died on January 6, 2021. He was an American poet and teacher. He wrote eight books of poetry and several chapbooks. His collected poems, The Old World in His Arms, was published in 2021 by Wolfson Press.

Biography

Jonathan Aldrich was born in Boston and attended school at Shady Hill School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, where he received the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize for Poetry, and the Bread Loaf School of English, where he was a Robert Frost Scholar. He was the older son of Bailey Aldrich, who worked as a United States federal judge for more than 48 years. Jonathan Aldrich taught at Elmira College, Berea College, and at the Maine College of Art for 25 years.

He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent every August at the home of his grandparents in Tenants Harbor, Maine. His memories of his summers there inspired his poetic sequence Foam (2012). His grandfather was businessman and painter Talbot Bailey Aldrich, and his great-grandfather was 19th-century writer and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

Aldrich’s first book, Croquet Lover at the Dinner Table (1977), was chosen for the Breakthrough Books competition at the University of Missouri Press. The series published first books of poetry and fiction. The title poem in his first collection was first published in 1959 in a small anthology honoring undergraduate winners of the Academy of American Poets Prize, a publication that included early works by Sylvia Plath, George Starbuck, and Robert Rehder. Aldrich’s book-length poetic sequence Wade’s Wait was the first single-author chapbook published by the Beloit Poetry Journal. It appeared as Chapbook 18 in Fall 1985.

He worked with artist Alison Hildreth on two books, including his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Le Voyage, which won the Stephen Harvard Award for Excellence in the Book Arts from the Baxter Society. The book is displayed online by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

In the oral history collection of the Jackson Memorial Library in St. George, Maine, Jonathan Aldrich’s voice is recorded telling a story about his grandmother, Eleanor Aldrich.

Aldrich married poet Nancy Aldrich (née Jewell) in 1966. Their children are Tom and Tess. Tom Aldrich is a composer.