George Franklin

George Franklin was a writer whose work has begun to receive rapturous critical attention after his death in 2023. Born in New York City in 1952, in 1975 he graduated from Harvard, where he studied poetry with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald. He subsequently received an MFA in creative writing from Brown and an MA in English literature from Columbia.

From his undergraduate years onwards, he pursued his vocation as a poet. In later life, he also increasingly wrote essays on philosophical, spiritual, and literary topics, often synthesizing different systems of thought in unique ways. Averse to self-promotion, Franklin rarely submitted his work for publication. Nonetheless, his undergraduate work “The Fall of Miss Alaska” was selected for inclusion in FIRST FLOWERING: The Best of the Harvard Advocate, and later poems appeared occasionally in literary magazines and, in his final years, in book form.

Franklin lived for more than a decade in the ashrams of his spiritual teacher in India and the US, where he developed a keen interest in a branch of Indian mystical thought, Kashmir Shaivism, and in the traditions of the poet saints of Maharashtra, India. He later studied other esoteric wisdom schools both Eastern and Western, religious and secular in orientation.

Throughout his life, bouts of severe depression alternated with long periods of joyful engagement with the world and people around him. His last years were among his most difficult but also his most richly productive. From the age of 67 until his death at 71, though suffering from multiple debilitating illnesses, Franklin rose daily well before dawn to produce a series of virtuosic books of poetry, memoir and literary criticism. He leaves behind a triumphant legacy in the form of his writing. Two books of his poetry, LAMENTATIONS (Ristretto Books, 2023) and THE FALL OF MISS ALASKA (Six Gallery Press, 2007), and the chapbook "Contour with Shadow" (Frolic Press, 2016), have been published, and more are forthcoming. Franklin was also the author of a memoir, PORTRAITS FROM LIFE, and several books of philosophy and literary criticism, including SOME SEGMENTS OF A RIVER: On Poetry, Mysticism, and the Imagination, VOICING ORPHEUS: On Poets and Poetry, and THE NECTAR OF SELF-AWARENESS: A Poet’s Rendering of Jnaneshwar’s Amritanubhav.

Praise for LAMENTATIONS:

“A thing of beauty: elegant, melancholy, rueful and profound.”

— Jessica Hagedorn, author of DOGEATERS, finalist for the National Book Award

“Doomed, brilliant, and stunningly self-aware, George Franklin was a poet of capacious vision……LAMENTATIONS is a singular account of a heart laid bare.”

— Dana Gioia, author of INTERROGATIONS AT NOON, winner of the American Book Award, and CAN POETRY MATTER?

"Over and over in these astonishing poems, George Franklin turns the momentary into the eternal and the minute particulars of a dramatic individual experience, with all its specified ardors and intimacies, into the experience of a civilization and of our species….The eloquence and the depth of articulation are a source of constant joy."

— Vijay Seshadri, author of 3 SECTIONS, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Praise for PORTRAITS FROM LIFE

“A revelatory, reflective, and gracefully drawn homage to a consummate group of poetic mentors.”

— starred Kirkus Reviews

Praise for SOME SEGMENTS OF A RIVER

"I would put this book beside Ted Hughes’s synoptic study of myth in Shakespeare or Northrop Frye's readings of the Bible, only the shelf is no place for it: it's a book to keep open."

— Henry Walters, author of FIELD GUIDE A TEMPO

"Full of fresh insights... Intriguing connections between East and West are made beyond the realm of poetry."

— Kirkus Reviews

"A unique perspective on Western literature, philosophy, and the arts…”

— Martin Edmunds, author of THE HIGH ROAD TO TAOS