Richard Eberhart, at 101; a poet who made simplicity seem sublime

Richard Eberhart, 101, a kite-flying poet who used everyday events such as encountering a dead groundhog or watching a squirrel cross a street to contemplate the fragility of life, died Thursday in his home in Hanover, N.H.

Mr. Eberhart, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for ''Selected Poems, 1930-1965," was a professor and poet in residence at Dartmouth College for more than 30 years.

''Dick was one out our finest American poets, not only in his work, but in his embrace of other poets," Cleopatra Mathis, director of Dartmouth's creative writing program, said yesterday.

Mr. Eberhart published more than a dozen poetry books, including ''Selected Poems," which won a National Book Award in 1977. Among his most anthologized works were ''The Groundhog" and ''On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn in New England."

''He wrote a lot about death," said his daughter, Gretchen Eberhart Cherington of Meriden, N.H. ''He anguished over issues of life and death, good and bad, nature and spirit."

He was US poet laureate from 1959 to 1961. Although he officially retired from Dartmouth in 1970, he continued to teach part time at the university until the mid-1980s.

Mr. Eberhart did not spend his whole life in academia. At various times he was a deck boy on a freighter, a Navy gunnery officer, and an executive with a Boston-based polish company.

For a couple of years in the 1930s, he was a tutor to the son of the King of Siam (now Thailand).

During World War II, he flew 7-foot kites used as targets for gunners. The kites, controlled with a rudder and two strings, can perform intricate aerial maneuvers. ''It was great fun. I used to love to play with these kites; I still do," Mr. Eberhart said in a story published in the Connecticut Review in 1997.

''He enjoyed flying kites for most of his life," his daughter said yesterday.

Mr. Eberhart was born in Austin, Minn. He wrote his first poems as a homework assignment in high school.

''When most of the students would bring in one poem the next day, I invariably brought five or 10," he said in 1997.

He attended the University of Minnesota for a year before transferring to Dartmouth, where he studied with Robert Frost.

After graduating from Dartmouth in 1926, he earned another bachelor's degree and a master's degree at St. John's College at Cambridge University in England.

After returning to the United States, he studied for a doctorate at Harvard University, but dropped out to make a living.

During the Great Depression, he taught at St. Mark's School in Southborough before becoming an artillery officer in the Navy during World War II.

After the war, he spent seven years in management at Butcher Polish Co. in Boston, which was owned by his wife's relatives, before joining the faculty at Dartmouth in 1956.

He was married to Helen Elizabeth Butcher from 1941 until her death in 1993.

Mr. Eberhart's poems were noted for their simplicity and directness. ''The Eclipse" from his Selected Poems is a choice example:

I stood out in the open coldTo see the essence of the eclipseWhich was its perfect darkness. I stood in the cold on the porchAnd could not think of anything so perfect As a man's hope of light in the face of darkness.

In addition to his daughter, he leaves a son, Richard of Phippsburg, Maine; and six grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday in Rollins Chapel at Dartmouth College.