Deutsch, Babette

Babette Deutsch, (born Sept. 22, 1895, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Nov. 13, 1982, New York), American poet, critic, translator, and novelist whose volumes of literary criticism, Poetry in Our Time (1952) and Poetry Handbook (1957), were standard English texts in American universities for many years.

Deutsch published poems in magazines such as the North American Review and the New Republic while still a student at Barnard College, New York City (B.A., 1917). She first attracted critical notice for her poetry with Banners (1919), the title poem of which celebrates the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Deutsch’s poetry collections include Honey out of the Rock (1925), imagist verse on marriage, motherhood, and the arts; Fire for the Night (1930); One Part Love (1939); and Take Them, Stranger (1944) and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (1954), both of which contain antiwar poetry. Deutsch and her husband, Avraham Yarmolinsky, also translated poetry from Russian and German, including Two Centuries of Russian Verse (1966). Her literary collaboration with Yarmolinsky produced several acclaimed translations, many of which were the first rendering into English of important works of European literature.

Among her critical studies are a collection of essays on poetry and poets entitled Potable Gold (1929), Heroes of the Kalevala, Finland’s Saga (1940), Walt Whitman, Builder for America (1941), and The Reader’s Shakespeare (1946). Her novels include the semiautobiographical A Brittle Heaven (1926); In Such a Night (1927); Mask of Silenus (1933), a novel about the philosopher Socrates; and Rogue’s Legacy (1942), about the French poet François Villon.