Bronk was born in Fort Edward, near Hudson Falls, New York where he lived his entire life except for his student years at Dartmouth College and Harvard University, a period of military service during World War II and a brief stint as an instructor at Union College. Even after he gained a wide readership, Bronk shrank from public attention and concentrated on his immediate surroundings. His writing expresses his refusal to compromise his life style and point of view as in his poem “The Abnegation” (1971): “I will not / be less than I am to be more human.” He believes that what he knows of the world is only a semblance of the truth at best. Reality exists and he is able to intuit its existence, but it is finally beyond his grasp. Despite Bronk’s asceticism, he was constantly sought out by readers and many poets who would journey to Hudson Falls to visit; for young poets, this trip was something of a rite of passage. Bronk won some major poetry awards, the American Book Award in 1982 and the Lannan Prize for his life’s work ten years later. When at Dartmouth, he met Frost, and his fellow student and friend was Samuel French Morse, who became a well known authority on Stevens. Bronk’s first publishing successes were due to the efforts of Cid CORMAN who printed Bronk’s work in Origin, the magazine he edited, and who published Bronk’s first book Light and Dark, in 1956. Bronk also enjoyed the support of Creeley in his magazine the Black Mountain Review, in the 1950s, and Bronk’s second book, The World, the Worldless, was published by New Directions in 1964 with the help of Oppen and his sister June Oppen Degnan, who was an editor at the press.

This network of fellow poets and editors should not suggest, however, that Bronk was in any sense a derivative poet. On the contrary, his work is original, his poetic voice singular and unforgettable. His language, indeed, is perhaps the clearest and most even in tone in all of twentieth-century American poetry, devoid of unnecessary wording, yet filled with subtle agreements of sound set out in a basic iambic line. Bronk’s poetic statements purport to describe the facts of life; and yet, paradoxically, Bronk constantly writes about the elusiveness of any fact. He finds a compromise he can live with. In his poem “The Rain of Small Occurences” (1955) he writes, “The world is not quite formless; we lean down / and feel the massive earth beneath our feet.” Yet the closest to factuality Bronk can come is the poem itself, ultimately a poem that in its sureness, in its reliability of diction, meter and outlook, insists on a reality beyond his comprehension. The best strategy for living Bronk can come up with is to embrace the present, the poem “On the Failure of Meaning in the Absence of Objective Analogs” (1971) suggests: “There is only this whatever this may mean / and this is what there is and nothing will be.”

What is knowable, on the other hand, is desire, and Bronk spends a great deal of time examining The Force Of Desire (a title of one of his books, published in 1979) in life. Desire is the “single great constant” in Bronk’s work, Norman Finkelstein writes. So, what is it that Bronk desires? Impossibly, he desires “the world”; knowing the world, all in all, is beyond his capacity. In any case, knowledge is only a logical realization, yet the human condition is not predicated on reason alone. “Despite the self-limiting fact that consciousness is aware of its inability to experience this totality, it continually struggles for the achievement of its goal. Cut off from any ground of belief, secure only in its desire, consciousness therefore creates a world, which despite its insufficiency in metaphysical terms nevertheless allows for the rendering of form—the poem” (481)