Biography of Robert Bagg

Bagg was born on 21 September 1935 and grew up in Millburn, New Jersey, where he attended its excellent public schools, played varsity golf, JV football, and began to publish humorous columns in the school paper. Fascinated by the exotic personality, romantic adventures, and harsh death by drowning of Percy Bysshe Shelley, he determined to see if he could make poetry his own line of work. His parents did not disapprove but sent him to Amherst College thinking that the faculty there would either endorse or discourage this particular vocation. At Amherst he had the good fortune to study with Walker Gibson and James Merrill and to alarm Robert Frost, who chided him for writing about sex, noting that Yeats waited until old age to broach that aspect of experience. In 1957, his senior year, Bagg won the lugubriously named Mount Holyoke College Glascock Memorial Poetry Prize. As Fate would have it, his college roommate was Ralph Lee, a brilliant mask maker and stage director. Bagg's Greek professors urged him to translate a short satyr drama, The Cyclops by Euripides; Lee crafted gorgeous masks for the play's huge one-eyed monster and directed it with gusto. Just before graduation the two collaborated on another play, based on the Nausicaa episode of Homer's Odyssey. That undergrad exposure to Greek drama set Bagg off on a lifelong career vector, translating the Athenian playwrights into contemporary speech. The University of Utah's Greek Drama Festival has staged three world premieres of his translations; Gerald Freedman staged his Bakkhai at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in 1995. After graduating from Amherst College, Bagg spent two years, with his first wife Sarah and their young family, hanging out with expats and natives in France and Italy, immersing himself in two sophisticated ancient cultures, both of which provided subjects and perspectives for his later poetry. While abroad from 1957 until 1959 he wrote his first book of poems, Madonna of the Cello (Wesleyan University Press, 1961). After a semester at Harvard he earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of Connecticut, taught briefly at the University of Washington (1963-65), and then spent the rest of his career at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he served as Department Chair from 1986 to 1992. His teaching specialties were English Romantic Poetry, Modern Poetry, and Great Books from Homer to Hemingway. He retired in 1996 to make up for lost time (ten years as an administrator) by translating more Greek plays, and writing essays and poems. His translations of Euripides and Sophocles (eight to date) have been staged in 60 productions worldwide. Over the years Prix de Rome, Ingram Merrill, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEA, and NEH fellowships have supported his projects. He has five children from his first marriage to Sarah Robinson Bagg, and has been married for thirteen years to Mary Bagg, a freelance writer and editor. They live in western Massachusetts. He is currently writing a critical biography of the poet Richard Wilbur.