Born in Orlando, Florida, and educated at Columbia and Princeton. From the mid-1950s he held a number of academic appointments, most prominently at Hollins College, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Virginia, where he was appointed Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing in 1984. Garrett was a complete man of letters who published in all genres, including short stories, screenplays, and literary criticism, and who edited anthologies and literary reviews. His first collection of poems, The Reverend Ghost, appeared in 1957 in Scribner's Poets of Today series. He subsequently published six collections, including For a Bitter Season: New and Selected Poems (University of Missouri Press, 1967) and The Collected Poems of George Garrett (University of Arkansas Press, 1984), as well as numerous chapbooks and broadsides.

Garrett's wit, literary sophistication, and deft handling of traditional forms linked him to the academic poets of the 1950s, like *Nemerov and *Wilbur, but he also wrote a substantial number of free-verse lyrics. He is at his best as a writer of intelligent light verse, satirical epigrams and invectives, and topical poems, all genres that have become rare in contemporary American poetry. A lifelong Episcopalian, Garrett drew on religious subjects for poems like ‘Revival’, which describes ironically the fervour of Southern fundamentalists. ‘Buzzard’, a frequently anthologized poem, depicts a predatory bird as the appropriate emblem of both religious and poetic inspiration. He was also the author of a number of sensitive love poems. In later years Garrett concentrated on writing fiction, including An Evening Performance: New and Selected Short Stories (1985); Poison Pen (1986), an entertaining work of social and literary satire; and a trilogy of novels about Elizabethan England. The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry