Starbuck studied at
Chadwick School, the
California Institute of Technology, the
University of California, Berkeley, the
American Academy in Rome, the
University of Chicago, and
Harvard University. He also studied under
Robert Lowell in the Boston University workshop with
Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton. He taught at the
Iowa Writers Workshop,
Boston University, and the
State University of New York, Buffalo. He was fired by SUNY-Buffalo for not taking a loyalty oath, but was vindicated by the
Supreme Court in 1965. His students included
Joshua Clover,
Maxine Kumin,
Peter Davison,
Emily Hiestand,
Mary Baine Campbell,
Craig Lucas, James Hercules Sutton, Shreela Ray, and
Askold Melnyczuk. Starbuck had five children: Margaret, Stephen, John, Anthony, and Joshua. His papers are held at the
University of Alabama library. Starbuck's work is marked by clever rhymes, witty asides, and the fusing of Romantic themes with cynicism about modern life. For example, his book
Bone Thoughts was published with half its pages blank, and he called his style of formalism "SLABS" (Standard Length And Breadth Sonnets). He was not widely appreciated in the mainstream culture during his lifetime, but two collections of his poems published in the early 2000s,
The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades and
Visible Ink, helped win him a wider audience. Julie Larios writes of Starbuck, "Often wrongly pigeonholed as a light verse poet, he was a technical master and superb ironist." Starbuck's best-known poems include "Tuolumne," "On an Urban Battlefield," and "Sonnet With a Different Letter At the End of Every Line." ==Awards==