Sydney Lea--poet, critic, novelist, editor, essayist, and teacher--in 1977 founded the New England Review , sponsored by Middlebury College, as a forum for little-known writers. Though works by Anthony Hecht and Robert Penn Warren have appeared in its pages, 98 percent of the contents come from unsolicited material. Lea's own poetry displays a relaxed formalism that avoids the T-square and metronomic effects of his forebears, the strictured New Critics.

Born of moderately affluent Episcopal parents in a Philadelphia suburb (Chestnut Hill), Lea counts his uncle's farm near Ambler, Pennsylvania, as his spiritual home. The oldest of the five children of Sydney L.W. Lea (a businessman) and Jane Jordan Lea, Sydney Lea, Jr., attended the private, all-male Chestnut Hill Academy. His brother Mahlon's death in 1980 at age thirty-five, of a brain aneurysm, continues to influence his writing. Lea earned his B.A. (1964), M.A. (1968), and Ph.D. (1972) from Yale, where he...