Born in Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, majoring in mathematics. A distinguished university career was interrupted only by two years in the army and three in publishing.

An early poem, ‘Named Individual’ (from Bone Thoughts, Yale University Press, 1960) shows Starbuck in characteristic pose, as citizen menaced or circled by shapeless inhuman forces, whether Government, the Bomb, or the Universe itself. He is equipped, however, with a veritable arsenal of strategies against the darkness, and the very qualities that make his work seem at first wilfully odd—ceaseless formal exploration, Byronic ingenuity in rhyme, and playful linguistic whimsy—proclaim his strength and sanity, while at the same time dramatizing the idiocy of what he opposes.

Throughout the Sixties and Seventies America's wars, leaders, laws, and broadcasters are caught in the roving spotlights of his craft, either in short, comic diplodactyls and clerihews, or in long, zigzagging rambles, culminating in Talkin’ B. A. Blues (Pym-Randall, 1980), a Dylanesque satire on higher education. But the poet's own practice does not escape: in ‘Tuolomne’ (from Desperate Measures (Godine, 1978) he apologizes to heaven for his tangential habits (‘I scribble sidenotes to the fall of nations’), displaying, alongside his self-awareness, signposts to a couple of roads he might have taken: descriptive lyric, and ruminations on ‘serious’ matters in ‘serious’ metres. That he continued instead to experiment at the edges of formal possibility, while delighting in America's Absurd, demonstrates his intelligence about what truly constitutes poetic ‘seriousness’: knowledge of the powers and limits of words themselves, and awareness that to don a joker's mask is merely one of the oldest and swiftest ways into the palace. The best of his unique work has been posthumously collected in The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades (University of Alabama Press, 2003), with a foreword by Anthony *Hecht.  The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry