Richard Poirier, 83, a literary critic and writer who was one of the founders of the Library of America, a monumental effort to keep American literary classics in print and accessible to the reading public, died Aug. 15 at Roosevelt Hospital in New York.
He suffered injuries in a fall at his home in New York, said a friend, poet Frederick Seidel.
Mr. Poirier taught English for many years at Rutgers University, where in 1981 he founded Raritan: A Quarterly Review, a journal of literary criticism and cultural commentary. Writers published in Raritan include poets John Ashbery and Richard Howard, the Palestinian-American writer Edward Said, critic Harold Bloom and feminist writer Camille Paglia.
Wide-ranging and prolific, Mr. Poirier was a critic and man of letters. He wrote books, essays, articles and reviews about America’s most perceptive writers and thinkers but he also explored such cultural phenomena as the American invasion of the Beatles.
In “Learning From the Beatles,” an essay originally published in Partisan Review in 1967, Mr. Poirier was one of the first commentators to argue that the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” represented an intermingling of pop and “serious” cultures that deserved close critical attention.
He also wrote about the impact of Vietnam on the culture and the significance of the 1960s revolution, and he once compared Bette Midler’s command of parody to that of the writers Norman Mailer, Ralph Ginzburg and Thomas Pynchon. In a 1968 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, he argued that the nation was at war with its restive young.
“The intellectual weapons used in the war against youth are from the same arsenal — and the young know this — from which war is being waged against other revolutionary movements, against Vietnam, against any effective justice, as distinguished from legislative melodrama, in matters of race and poverty.”
In a collection of essays and reviews called “Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performers” (1999), Mr. Poirier maintained that writers and artists, in the pioneering spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, are constantly experimenting, constantly avoiding fixed forms of language, thought and assumptions. They are, so to speak, “trying it out” as they attempt to view the world in new ways.
“Richard Poirier likes what he likes and he lays waste to what he doesn’t,” reviewer Dawn Trouard wrote in The Washington Post in 1999. “It has long been a pleasure to read him in the process of doing just that.” In “Trying It Out,” he was “delightfully himself,” Trouard wrote.
Mr. Poirier, who wrote books about James, Frost and Mailer, was a major force behind the Library of America, the ambitious ongoing effort to publish the works of the greatest writers America has produced. With grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the non-profit venture began publishing in May 1982.
Nearly 200 volumes have been published to date.
Mr. Poirier joined the project in its planning stages in 1977 and served on its board of directors until 2006.