Worthington, MA – Robert Ely (Bob) Bagg, 90, died peacefully on April 9, 2026, in hospice care at home. Born to Theodore Ely Bagg and Elma (White) Bagg on September 21, 1935, he grew up in Millburn, NJ. In high school, enamored with the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sweeping imaginary landscapes, writing poetry became Bob’s calling.
At Amherst College, his father’s alma mater, Bob studied for a year with the poet James Merrill, who encouraged him to forego emulating Shelley and focus instead on the adventures of his own suburban youth. Poems in iambic pentameter about boyhood escapades were the first in what became Bob’s signature narrative style. In 1957 he won the Mount Holyoke College Glascock Poetry Prize, judged by Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht, and Andrews Wanning.
Lasting friendships at Amherst shaped him in other ways. Bob’s Classics professors Tom Gould and John Moore urged him to translate Euripides’ satyr play “Cyclops”; his roommate Ralph Lee, later a renowned puppet master and dramatist, directed it. That experience opened a new career path: translating the Athenian playwrights into contemporary speech. His translations have been staged in 75 productions worldwide.
After graduation, a fellowship from Amherst and a Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters exposed Bob to expat life in France and to Rome’s ancient culture-subjects and perspectives he would develop in his poetry. In 1965 he earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Connecticut. His dissertation analyzed autobiographical poetry from Archilochus and Sappho to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
Bob taught at the University of Washington (1963–65) and for the rest of his career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he served as graduate director and English Department chair. In 1997 he retired to translate, write, and play more golf, a sport pursued with passion since childhood.
Bob’s work has appeared in 21 anthologies and numerous journals. Among his books of poems are “Madonna of the Cello” (a finalist for the 1962 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in poetry), “Scrawny Sonnets and Other Narratives” (1973), “Body Blows” (1988), and “Horsegod” (1998). His translations of Sophocles culminated in HarperCollins’s “Complete Plays of Sophocles” (2011), with two of the seven plays translated by James Scully, a lifelong friend from UConn. In 2019 UMass Press published “Four by Euripides,” a volume comprising “Medea,” “The Bakkhai,” “Hippolytos,” and “Cyclops.”
In 2007 Bob received a “We the People” award from the NEH to support “Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study,” coauthored with his wife Mary (UMass Press, 2017).
Bob is survived by his wife Mary (Bauman) Bagg and family members living within the US and across the Atlantic: five children from his marriage to Sally Robinson Bagg-Theodore, Christopher, Jonathan, Melissa, and Hazzard; two step-children, Melanie Bauman and Michael Bauman; eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren; his sister Susan Todd; three nieces, five great-nephews, and one great-niece.
Donations in Bob’s name can be made to Cooley-Dickinson VNA and Hospice. A celebration of Bob’s life will be held in the summer.
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