Edward Reed Whittemore, Jr. (September 11, 1919 – April 6, 2012[1]) was an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist and college professor.

He was appointed the sixteenth and later the twenty-eighth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1964, and in 1984.

[2] Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Whittemore attended Phillips Academy and received a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1941.

As a sophomore at Yale, he and his roommate James Angleton started a literary magazine called Furioso which became one of the most famous "little magazines" of its day and published many notable poets including Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

man anybody knows, has been at all kinds of places, yet shuffles along in an old pair of tennis shoes and khaki pants, with his hands in his pockets.” In November 2007 Dryad Press published his memoir, Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet, with an introduction by Garrison Keillor who took a class from him in his youth, calling him a "movie-star handsome poet and teacher" who "owns the only sort of immortality that matters to a writer, which is to have written things that people remember years later .

permanently readable and relevant is his wit and humor, which is the underground spring that keeps the gardens of American literature green."

He had a medium-grade mind and managed to mix intellectual modesty with sudden arrogance.