Proletarian poet and pro-Communist professor at New York University. Varney graduated from Dartmouth and attended Yale Divinity School. From Harvard University he received a Master of Arts as well as a Law degree. Following the Russian Revolution, Varney made several trips to the Soviet Union, spent a great deal of time in Europe in the 1920s, and was married for a brief time. He taught at New York University in the English Department from early 1930s to 1953, and thereafter wrote poetry and traveled. Varney published seven books of his own verse: First Wounds, A Story in Five Chapters of Verse (1926), Sketches of Soviet Russia (1920), Sparrow Hawks (1950), Stalingrad, New Years (1943), Star Men, U.S.A. (1956), Spun Sequence (1960), and Poems for a Prose Age (1960).