Poets' Theatre (Cambridge, Mass.)

The Poets' Theatre, Cambridge, Mass., founded in 1951, commissioned and produced poetic drama by Archibald MacLeish, Richard Eberhart, Djuna Barnes, Frank O'Hara and others.

The Poets' Theatre was first established by a group of poets living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1950. Their objective was to revive poetic drama and generate work by poets who "would act, administrate, direct, and sell tickets, while retaining total control of their own writing." Members included Richard Eberhart, John Ciardi, Richard Wilbur, V. R. (Violet Ranney "Bunny") Lang, Hugh Amory, John Ashbery, Edward Gorey, Donald Hall, William Matchett, George Montgomery, Frank O'Hara, Lyon Phelps, and others. Except for V. R. Lang, they were all attending Harvard College, or had recently graduated from it. Other names associated with the theater were: Alison Lurie, Kenneth Koch, Mary Manning Howe, Catharine Huntington, Edward Albert Thommen, William Morris Hunt, and many others. In 1968 the theater building on Palmer Street burned down and the Poets' Theatre ended. In October of 1986, a celebration was held in the Agassiz Theatre in Cambridge to memorialize the Poets' Theatre, called by Edward Gorey, a nostalgic "wake."