Guy Carleton Drewry (21 May 1901–3 August 1991), poet, was born in Stevensburg, in Culpeper County, and was the son of Samuel Richard Drewry, a Methodist minister, and Julia Harriett Pinkard Drewry. He grew up in a series of towns in rural eastern and central Virginia as his father moved from pastoral assignment to pastoral assignment. Drewry received his initial schooling in a class his father conducted in a Louisa County one-room schoolhouse, and what little formal education he later acquired was disrupted and fragmentary. He never obtained a high school diploma. Drewry worked at various times as a store clerk in Louisa and as a laborer in a Roanoke fish market. He was living on his family's Franklin County farm in 1922 when he was offered a job as a clerk in the statistical department at the Norfolk and Western Railway Company. He moved to Roanoke and remained with the railroad until retiring in 1966. On 2 April 1942 Drewry married Margaret Elisabeth McDonald, a schoolteacher. They had one daughter and one son.
Drawn to the beauty of words but lacking access to a library as a young man, Drewry developed a sense of literary style and vocabulary from reading novels and derived a feel for rhythm and rhyme from church hymnals. Although initially he aspired to write fiction, his talents lay in poetry. Drewry's early verse appeared in small journals, but in December 1924 an influential literary magazine, The Dial, printed his poem "Life." The poem's stark vision of humanity adrift in an implacable universe was well-suited to a publication regarded as a leading proponent of Modernist literature. In 1929, after the Norfolk-based magazine The Lyric moved to Roanoke, the poet and editor Leigh Hanes brought Drewry aboard as associate editor. Drewry remained with the magazine until 1949, when ownership of The Lyric passed to an organization in New York City.
Drewry's earliest work appeared under his full name, but by early in the 1930s he had begun writing as Carleton Drewry. Several of his poems appeared in a 1932 anthology of Virginia poets, and the following year the Macmillan Company published Proud Horns (1933), a collection of his verse that included work previously published in the Nation, New Republic, and Voices. Widely reviewed in the United States, the volume also won notice in the London-based Times Literary Supplement and in the London Mercury. A New York Herald-Tribune reviewer observed that few of Drewry's contemporaries exceeded the quality of his verse, and the Chicago Daily Tribune praised his "sensitive ear" and "perfected technique." Although an unspecified crisis in Drewry's personal life caused him to cease writing for a time, by the end of the decade he had resumed. He also experimented with short stories and a novel, interests that he pursued from time to time.
In 1948 E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., brought out Drewry's collection entitled The Sounding Summer, which the New York Times praised for its eloquence and craftsmanship. That year Drewry was elected a member of the Poetry Society of America. In 1952 the society awarded him a cash prize of $1,250 for A Time of Turning (1951) as the best book of poetry published in the preceding year. Drewry further burnished his reputation with The Writhen Wood (1953) and Cloud above Clocktime (1957). Early in the decade Drewry edited an all-southern issue of Voices and served as a visiting lecturer at Hollins College (later Hollins University). He also taught creative writing at the University of Virginia Extension Division, in Roanoke.
Drewry drew inspiration from the Elizabethan, Pre-Raphaelite, and late-Victorian poets. Although he composed in traditional lyric form, he took for a major subject the modern theme of alienation, focusing on humankind's evolutionary journey from its animal origins to modern civilization and the resulting estrangement from the natural world. Drewry's poems probed the nature of that exile and the trauma he believed it had created in the human psyche. Seeking a tonic for his "homesickness of the heart," Drewry imagined in his poems his physical reunion with, and immersion in, the "green world," and his verse voiced a Buddhist-like empathy with, and reverence for, all living things. His poems appeared in such newspapers and periodicals as the Carolina Quarterly, Georgia Review, New York Herald-Tribune, New York Times, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Queen's Quarterly, Saturday Evening Post, Southwest Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Yale Review and in various anthologies, including American Writing: 1942, Virginia Reader (1948), the University of Pennsylvania's collection entitled Poetry Awards, 1949, and a 1956 compilation of the work of Virginia lyricists.
During Drewry's career the general public's interest in poetry declined as the medium became increasingly the preserve of academics who preferred the often-opaque constructions of the Modernists. Lyric poetry fell out of fashion. Although Drewry's publisher stopped accepting poetry collections in the 1950s, and the number of magazines publishing verse gradually declined, he continued to write. From 1952 until at least 1955 he served as one of three regional presidents of the Poetry Society of Virginia. In this office he frequently corresponded with Gertrude Harris Boatwright Claytor, a Roanoke poet then residing in New York City. In 1967 Drewry won the Leigh Hanes Memorial Prize and in 1969 the Poetry Society of Virginia's Keats Memorial Sonnet Prize. He sat on the society's advisory board from at least 1963 to 1981, served on a committee in 1967 that founded a poetry collection at Richmond Professional Institute (later Virginia Commonwealth University), and in the mid-1960s helped revise the society's constitution. In 1957 Drewry became regional vice president of the Poetry Society of America, an office he held until his death.
On 14 March 1970 the General Assembly appointed Drewry as poet laureate of Virginia, the sixth poet so honored. It was likely intended as a one-year appointment, but the assembly did not select another laureate until after his death. To Love That Well (1975) included a selection of poems from Drewry's earlier books and previously uncollected material. In May 1975 he was the featured poet at the Poetry Society of Virginia's annual meeting and read selections from the book.
Debilitated by a series of strokes, Guy Carleton Drewry died of pneumonia and congestive heart failure in a Roanoke hospital on 3 August 1991. His remains were cremated. In 1993 the Poetry Society of Virginia published an anthology of Virginia poetry and placed one of Drewry's poems in the front matter, both as an introduction to the verse within and as a tribute to his writing career.
Sources Consulted:
Biographical Files (with self-reported birth date in interview, 13 Mar. 1940), Virginia Writers' Project, Work Projects Administration of Virginia Papers, Accession 30432, Library of Virginia; Richard Lee Morton, comp., Virginia Lives: The Old Dominion Who's Who (1964), 282–283; Virginia Dickens Eure, "Poet Laureate of Virginia: Carleton Drewry," Commonwealth 37 (May 1970): 21–26 (third and fourth quotations, cover portrait); Seth Williamson, "The Poet in Winter … Carleton Drewry," Roanoker 13 (May 1986): 14–15, 38–41; Guy Carleton Drewry Papers (1929–1970), Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Poetry Society of Virginia Archives, Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 May 1933 (first and second quotations); Richmond News Leader, 17 Oct. 1934, 19 Feb. 1970; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 6 Apr. 1952, 19, 20 Feb. 1970, 11 Oct. 1976; Roanoke Times, 7 Apr. 1957, 10 Feb. 1991; obituaries in Roanoke Times and World-News, 4 Aug. 1991, Richmond News Leader and Richmond Times-Dispatch, both 5 Aug. 1991, and Washington Post, 6 Aug. 1991.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Donald W. Gunter.
How to cite this page:
Donald W. Gunter, "Guy Carleton Drewry (1901–1991)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Drewry_Guy_Carleton, accessed [today's date]).
Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.
