At Yale, while working as a reader for Penny Poems under Al Shavzin and Don Mull,[2] he began writing poetry and briefly met Gregory Corso and Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones).
Upon arrival in Buffalo, Max Wickert formed close friendships with a number of writers who were then students or fellow teachers, including Dan Murray, Shreela Ray, Robert Hass and John Logan.
Other significant colleagues at Buffalo were poets Robert Creeley, Irving Feldman, Mac Hammond and Bill Sylvester; novelists John Barth, J. M. Coetzee (his office mate for a year), and Carlene Polite; and critics Albert Spaulding Cook, Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Abel, and Dwight Macdonald.
In collaboration with Hubert Kulterer, he also translated 1001 Ways to Live Without Working, by the American Beat poet Tuli Kupferberg, into German.
As a scholar, Max Wickert produced a handful of articles and conference papers on Spenser, Shakespeare and early opera, but was principally known as a teacher of a lower-division course on Dante’s Divine Comedy and of an Intensive Survey of English Literature, a seminar of his own design for specially motivated majors.
He published The Liberation of Jerusalem,[10] a verse translation of Torquato Tasso’s epic, Gerusalemme liberata, in 2008, and a year later completed translations of a medieval prose romance, Andrea da Barberino’s Reali di Francia (The Royal House of France) and of Università per Stranieri (University for Aliens) by the contemporary Italian poet, Daniela Margheriti.