Philip Booth, 81, Poet and Syracuse Professor
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Philip Booth, a longtime Syracuse University professor whose poetry focused mainly on his native New England, died July 2 in Hanover, N.H. he was 81.
Booth, who studied with Robert Frost and was a prominent member of a literary circle in Castine, Maine, explored New England themes with a native son’s understanding of the landscape and coastline. His sparse style combined Down East Maine economy and naturalistic rhythms.
“After work, splitting birch by the light outside his back door, a man in Maine thinks what his father told him, splitting outside this same back door,” he wrote in the poem “A Man in Maine.”
Booth was born in Hanover, where his father taught at Dartmouth College. The family spent summers in Castine.
While in the Air Force in World War II, Booth met his wife, Margaret Tillman. The two raised three daughters while Booth taught at Dartmouth and then at Wellesley College in the 1950s. In the 1960s, he moved to Syracuse, where he became poet in residence and co-founded the graduate program in creative writing.
His collections of poetry included “The Islanders,” “Weathers and Edges” and “Letter From a Distant Land.”
He also published in magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and The American Poetry Review.
Stephen Dunn, Booth’s student at Syracuse and the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, stayed in touch with his former teacher for years.
“He was a major influence first as a teacher and then as a friend who continued to be a teacher,” Dunn said from his home in Frostburg, Md. “I know I would not have been as exacting and precise as I wished to be had it not been for him.”
In the 1980s, the Booths moved to the Castine home where he had spent summers as a boy and where five generations of his family had lived. He worked in an upstairs room with a view of Main Street and, with several other writers, earned Castine a reputation as a center for writers.
Booth’s poetry “perfectly reflects Castine, but also the region,” said Dixie Gray, curator of a summer Historical Society exhibition that features Booth. “It’s what we see around us, or what he taught us to see about this place and what we do here.”
