Cid (Sidney) Corman has said that his development as a poet shows "no neat rising curve. Or any sort of line at all." His poetic achievement is perhaps most significantly linked to his involvement for nearly thirty years as editor and publisher of Origin, his poetry magazine, and his small Origin press.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Corman wrote his first poem in 1941 as a freshman at Tufts College in Massachusetts. It was a quatrain, "largely the overflow of adolescence and Pearl Harbor and a steady diet of Ruskin's Modern Painters . Nothing could have surprised me more than that very act and I am still caught in the wonder of it." Because of a kidney debility he did not serve in World War II, and after receiving a B.A. from Tufts in 1945, he did graduate work in literature at the University of Michigan, with the encouragement of John...