Byron A. Vazakas was the son of Alfred Vazakas, a Greek-born linguist who emigrated sometime before 1900 and established a language school in Herald Square, and Margaret Keffer, a young woman who grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania,[1] is the daughter of a former Pennsylvania state legislator, Rep. Aaron T. C. Keffer, a descendant of Henry Clay.

Tragedy struck during Christmas week 1912 when Alfred Vazakas died suddenly of pneumonia and the family was left destitute.

Although he served as an altar boy, Byron rebelled against the school’s strict discipline and dropped out after the eighth grade.

Byron continued to live with his mother at various locations near City Park until her death in December 1940.

After he left that job, out of boredom and frustration, his family never pressured him to seek employment, even during the Great Depression.

A close friendship developed with William Baziotes, another young Reading man of Greek parentage who later achieved fame as an abstract expressionist painter.

[2][3] Vazakas established himself as a writer in Reading, but only a small number of people knew that he wrote poetry.

When discussing his career in later years, Vazakas never mentioned either "The Galleon" or "The Bard" or the large body of early work.

From 1936 to 1942, Vazakas’ prose writing appeared in the "Reading Times" and the "Historical Review of Berks County."

Statements in its text also establish Vazakas as the author of a more ambitious work, "The History of Reading Hospital," published in 1942.

But I did, too.” In December 1945, a high point for Vazakas while awaiting publication of "Transfigured Night" was a joint reading with Tennessee Williams in the YMHA Poetry Center in New York.

He enjoyed an association with the literary group centered on Archibald MacLeish that included John Ciardi and Richard Wilbur.

On four occasions he received fellowships to summer colonies at Breadloaf, VT; Yaddo, NY; and McDowell, NH.

The following year, on the recommendation of Archibald MacLeish, he won an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship for 1962-63, renewed for 1963-64, and went to England.

Donald's son, Tom currently resides in San Diego with his two children Ben and Saul Vazakas.

All are in typescript in the Vazakas Papers, Special Collections, Gingrich Library, Albright College, Reading, PA.

He regarded these as practice poems and asked his friend, Galleon editor Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, to destroy them, as he did, when Vazakas said he had found his true poetic voice.

In the Introduction to Transfigured Night, he called him “that important phenomenon among writers, an inventor” because of his approach to the poetic line.

In contrast, Wallace Stevens, despite the connection to Reading, his birthplace, was only coolly cordial, though later he was reported to have described Vazakas as a “clever fellow.” At various times Vazakas enjoyed an association with other writers: Tennessee Williams, John Ciardi, James Merrill, Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, and Edwin Honig.

These included the rich vein of material he mined from his “Edwardian childhood” in New York City and his boyhood in Lancaster, PA.

He was a “walking poet” in the manner of Walt Whitman, and whatever he saw and reflected upon was grist for his poetic mill, whether it was in the Berks County countryside, the streets of Boston or London, or Paris, or the run-down sections of Reading or Philadelphia.

From the start, Vazakas identified himself with the image of an outsider, a young man painfully and ironically aware of a romantic isolation as he argues with the world.

He escapes in a number of ways: the pleasure of reliving the past, the love of a friend and the security of home, and the joy of music, art, and nature.

His subjects include writers and painters (Federico García Lorca, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman); people who stepped outside the moral code (Oscar Wilde); political radicals (Rosa Luxemburg); people forced into violent situations against their will; and, eventually, the dregs of society.

To him, morality was “the ethical treatment of others.” He abhorred the deliberate loss of life, whether from the death penalty or from military initiatives that forced young men to be candidates for an early death or to “kill without anger.” He approved of suicide if that was the only honorable course of action that enabled an individual to take control of his life.

Instead, he emphasized the value of “the words themselves” in conveying “an attitude or aspect personally experienced and felt.” Three decades later Vazakas revised that first description.

He said, “It may sound like merely cadenced poetry, but most is pure iambic.” He explained that the iambic mode might be obscured by the lack of rhyme and the use of enjambment.

Summary Vazakas characterized his poetry by placing himself “midway between the pure literary, intellectual, cerebral and a man like Sandburg, particularly.” In contrast to Wallace Stevens, Vazakas called his own poetry “psychologic, graphic.” In a poem of his, he said, “Joe, the hatter,” would be an actual person, not a symbolic presence, and the subject of the poem would be “the suffering or hardships of Joe.” In Joe and all his counterparts, down to society’s seamiest outcasts, Vazakas expressed “the personal experience of everyman, in an appropriate form.