About William Bronk
William Bronk was an American poet born on February 17, 1918, in Fort Edward, New York, and died on February 22, 1999, in Hudson Falls, New York. He is a descendant of Jonas Bronck, who coined the name Bronx. He is also the author of many essays.William Bronk spent all his life in upstate New York, in the small town of Hudson Falls. He lived in the family home, a Victorian house, and managed the business, a retail fuel and building supply firm, that he inherited from his father, from 1945 until the mid-1970s. Bronk was born in Fort Edward, New York and educated at Dartmouth. He served as an army historian during World War II and wrote A History of the Eastern Defense Command and of the Defense of the Atlantic Coast of the United States in the Second World War (1945).
A critical book, The Brother of Elysium (1980), includes essays on several nineteenth-century American writers. Bronk’s work has had a paradoxical thematic consistency throughout his career: he concentrates on how we construct knowledge of the world, and yet his work disrupts our confidence in those very mental operations. Sometimes the topical focus is very specific, as in his poems about music, or the poems included here about the Mayan ruins, also the subject of his essays in The New World (1974). At other times, the topics are more abstractly epistemological or phenomenological, as in his poems about light. He avoided the poetry establishment for most of his life, meanwhile remaining one of the relatively few poets with a stable income. His career was an exceptionally focused one, with a wry intensity that is uniquely his own.
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