Edgar Bowers born 2 March 1924 (d. 2000)Edgar Bowers was an American poet who won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1989.
Bowers was born in Rome, Georgia in 1924. He served in Counter-intelligence in Germany during World War II ending his military service in Berchtesgaden, Hitler's eyrie in the Bavarian Alps. The experiences of these years had a deep and permanent effect on his poetry.
On his discharge in April 1946 he returned to the University of North Carolina, and then finished his graduate studies with a Ph.D. in English at Stanford University.
For a decade he taught at several universities including Duke University and Harpur College. He then settled at the University of California at Santa Barbara where he stayed for 30 years until he retired in 1991. He was a member of the English Faculty where he specialised in English Renaissance and modern poetry.Bowers published several books of poetry, including The Form of Loss, For Louis Pasteur, and The Astronomers. He won two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and taught at Duke University and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1959, and a second one in 1969.
The work of Edgar Bowers first came to be widely known in Britain in 1963 when Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn included him in their Faber volume Five American Poets.
Edgar Bowers was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1989 for his For Louis Pasteur.
After retiring in 1991 he moved to San Francisco. He died at the age of 75 from non-Hodgkins lymphoma.