Stephen Burt is a literary critic who teaches at Harvard University. He received tenure there in 2010. He is best known for coining the term "elliptical poetry" in a 1998 essay in Boston Review magazine. In 2009, a subsequent essay proposed "The New Thing" as the contemporary movement in American poetry.
He has also written for The New York Times Book Review, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the Yale Review. His book Randall Jarrell and His Age won the Warren-Brooks Award in 2002.
He earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Yale in 2000 before joining the faculty at Macalester College, his first academic post.