Internal Difference

Ward David C.

David Ward started writing poetry in his late thirties. His poems are the work of an historian who knows how environments and events, on a family or a national scale, shape and change us, and how we live with moral and psychological consequences of actions for which we are not ever fully accountable. Ward is an outstanding critic of modern poetry, and his creative work responds to it with attentive originality. He has recourse to verse when prose fails: it comes to him at times of intensity or difficulty, is usually unexpected, and then abandons him again. That it has returned is a matter of history, that it will return a matter of faith.

About the Author

David C. Ward is a Senior Historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, among others. With graduate degrees from Warwick University and Yale, he is the author of "Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic" (2004) and (with Jonathan D. Katz) "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" (2010). His exhibition "Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets" opened at the NPG in Autumn 2012. His pamphlet of poems "Internal Difference" was published by Lintott Press in 2011 and his verse was anthologised in "New Poetries V" (Carcanet, 2011).

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