Whittemore, (Edward) Reed (II) (1919- )
poet. Edward Reed Whittemore was born in New Haven, Connecticut. His father was a physician. He was educated at Phillips Academy, Andover, and at Yale, where he says he "immediately became a literary entrepreneur." He was drafted into the army after graduating from Yale in 1941. Following a brief postwar term as a graduate student in history at Princeton, Whittemore took a teaching post at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Whittemore's first volume of poetry, Heroes and Heroines published in 1946. Since 1968, he has been a professor of English at the University of Maryland. He was Maryland's poet laureate from 1986-1991.

Here is a list of his books put in order by their publishing dates:

• Heroes and Heroines (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946).
• An American Takes a Walk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956; London: Oxford University Press, 1956).
• The Self-Made Man (New York: Macmillan, 1959).
• The Boy from Iowa (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
• The Fascination of the Abomination: Poems, Stories, and Essays (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1963).
• Little Magazines (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1963; London: Oxford University Press, 1964).
• Return, Alpheus: A Poem for the Literary Elders of Phi Beta Kappa (Williamsburg, Va.: King & Queen Press, 1965).
• Ways of Misunderstanding Poetry (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1965).
• From Zero to Absolute (New York: Crown, 1967).
• Poems, New and Selected (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967).
• Fifty Poems Fifty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970; London: Oxford University Press, 1970).
• The Mother's Breast and the Father's House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
• William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).
• The Poet As Journalist (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1975).

Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II, First Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Donald J. Greiner, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1980. pp. 372-378.