John Holmes

Tufts poet, professor, & critic John Holmes (1904-1962) was friend, teacher, and mentor to many fellow poets. Anne Sexton and John Ciardi A’38 were among his students in writers’ workshops and Tufts’s classes. After his death, his wife, poet, memoirist, and Wellesley dean & lecturer Doris Holmes Eyges (1921-2016) donated Professor Holmes’s large poetry collection to the Tufts library. Many volumes, by intention, are in the circulating collection. Presentation copies, gifts such as these, from Ciardi and Robert Frost, are important parts of Tisch Special Collections. Holmes’s papers are held in the Tufts Archival Research Center, which hosts an online exhibit dedicated to the first Tufts Poet.