Born in New York City as Samuel Menashe Weisberg, the son of immigrants from Bessarabia and Ukraine. After the war, he used his GI Bill money to study at the Sorbonne where he received a Ph.D. for the thesis Un essai sur lexpérience poétique (étude introspective) in 1950.In the 1950s, Menashe returned to New York where, ex- cept for frequent sojourns in England and Ireland, he lived most of his life. In 1961, he garnered the blessing of the British poet Kathleen Raine who arranged for his first book, The Many Named Beloved, to be published by Victor Gollancz in London. Menashe's short, intense, spiritual poems, which canvass existential dilemmas and use implication and wordplay as a way of deepening the linguistic force of his words, gained wide renown in Britain from reviewers such as Donald Davie, who be- came one of Menashe's most committed backers. He was later included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. In 2004 he became the first poet honored with the "Neglected Masters Award" given by Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation. The award was also to include a book to be published bythe Library of America, which turned out to be a "Selected Poems" edited by Ricks. This volume appeared in 2005 on the occasion ofthe poet's 80th birthday, and was widely reviewed. Arevised edition, with ten addi- tional poems, was published in 2008. Bloodaxe Books in the UK published the volume (which also contained a DVD film about the poet's life and work) in 2009.