As a poet, essayist, and anthologist, David Mason has played a prominent and formative role in the development of New Formalism. His two volumes of poetry exemplify the attention to meter, rhyme, and narrative on which New Formalism has staked its identity. His essays, by defending the relevance of poetry to life outside of an academic environment and by attention to such poets as W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robinson Jeffers, offer some of the clearest and most vigorous articulations of New Formalist concerns. The anthology of New Formalist poetry that he and Mark Jarman edited, Rebel Angels (1996), has prompted intense, ongoing debate.

David James Mason was born on 11 December 1954 in Bellingham, Washington, where he lived through his childhood. His father, James Cameron Mason, worked as a naval officer, then as a pediatrician and psychiatrist. His mother, Evelyn Peterson, worked as a professor of...