The Poetry of William Mundell - Don McLean

The 2022 Brattleboro Literary Festival is celebrating the 21st year with its first live and in person festival since 2019.  William Mundell (1912-1997)  is one of Vermont’s finest native-born poets.  He lived his entire life in South Newfane, unusually combining his career as a poet with work as a carpenter, stone mason, and State highway foreman.  He served on the town selectboard, as an auditor, and justice of the peace, and was also editor of Poet Lore magazine.  In 1989, he was named Vermont Poet Laureate, by the Poetry Society of Vermont; the previous recipient of the award had been Robert Frost.  Don McLean is a Guilford, Vermont based independent scholar and composer. As part of the Brattleboro Words Project McLean contributed to the research of three 19th century Guilford/Brattleboro literary personalities, which included Lucy Terry Prince, 18th century African American poet of Guilford; Royall and Mary Tyler, who lived in both Guilford and Brattleboro in the early 19th century; and the  fiction author Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, who lived in Brattleboro later in that century.  His lecture on the 20th century Vermont poet, William Mundell, scheduled for 2020, was interrupted during the Covid crisis.