He attended Columbia High School amid the “wild hills” of suburban Maplewood, New Jersey, where he was raised.
[2][3] His undergraduate education at Amherst College was interrupted by his service in the United States Army Air Force during World War II.
The poet W. S. Merwin has described Ferry's work as having an "assured quiet tone" that communicates "complexities of feeling with unfailing proportion and grace."
His original poetry has flourished in the shadow of this other work and he likes to juxtapose translations with his own poems in an acknowledgement of influence and tradition.
He has written critically about Wordsworth and always intends to communicate with readers, approaching both translation and original work with a wise passivity, even humility, in pursuit of “the heartbeat easy governance / Of long continued metrical discipline” (‘A Thank-You Note’).
This selection draws from his whole oeuvre, including ‘Poem’ (1960) which shows a young poet not wanting to howl or essay a barbaric yawp, but rather stiffly confined to New Formalist and Classical models, to inversion and Romantic lexis.
You could fall through the spaces.” Here Ferry interpolates lines from Samuel Johnson on “chasms infinitely deep” that lie beneath the surface of things.
For all their elegance and plain-speaking, these poems are marvellously unstable, modern, poignantly facing up to the limits of the faulty equipment we are given to understand the world.
Lesser poets might be reduced to silence, or tear language to shreds, but Ferry's provisional songs instruct, console, distract, remain to be admired.
[12] Writing in the TLS, classicist Richard Jenkyns called Ferry's Aeneid "the best modern version...both for its loyalty to the original and for its naturalness in itself.