William Dowd ’06 (right) majored in English and will pursue a master’s in science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, and then a master’s of fine arts in creative writing at Columbia University, in New York City.

“The Cave and Its Caveman”

Suzanne Matson, professor, English department

“William’s project, a collection of 30 intricately tuned poems, engaged a range of poetics and themes. To open each section Will translated a poem from Baudelaire as a way of bridging his work to an important poetic predecessor and making the implicit point that all poetry is in fact translation, a filtering of experience and thought through the transformative lens of language. The original poems that followed drew from voices across the rhetorical spectrum, using both free verse and traditional forms—always with an apt formal strategy and a convincing vision.”