Poets

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Maya Angelou

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-------- was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1928. Her childhood was a difficult one, filled with racism and abuse. She was raped when she was seven years old and did not speak for five years afterwards. As a young woman, she drifted into prostitution. ---------- transformed her life dramatically, however, when she began working in the theatre. She rose to become a civil rights activist and one of the most prominent writers in America. In 1993, she delivered the inaugural poem at President Bill Clinton's first inauguration.

----------- has written in every conceivable genre of literature, including autobiography, poetry, fiction, and journalism. In particular, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), the first volume of her autobiography, has proven enduringly popular. She has been nominated for a number of the nation's most prestigious literary awards.

"I started writing when I was mute," Angelou has said. "I always thought I could write because I loved to read so much… I had memorized so much of [Paul Laurence] Dunbar, Poe, Shakespeare, James Weldon Johnson, Longfellow."

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Margaret Atwood

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-----------------, perhaps the most prominent Canadian writer of her generation, was born in 1939 in Ottawa. She began her literary career as a poet, before moving into other genres. Over the course of her career she has become an important cultural spokesperson, focusing in particular on feminist concerns. In addition to writing in almost every genre, she is also a painter and illustrator.

--------------'s poetry often focuses on images of violence, and critics have commented on the impersonality of her early poetry, while noting the relative openness of her more recent work. It is not as a poet, however, that she is best known, but as the author of such best-selling novels as The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which was made into a motion picture, and Cat's Eye (1988). Many readers who come to her poetry no doubt do so by way of her fiction.

"For me," she has said, "every poem has a texture of sound which is at least as important to me as the 'argument.' This is not to minimize 'statement.' But it does annoy me when students, prompted by the approach of their teacher, ask, 'What is the poet trying to say?' It implies that the poet is some sort of verbal cripple who can't quite 'say' what he 'means.'"

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W. H. Auden

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He was one of the most technically gifted poets of the twentieth, or possibly any, century. Born in York, England, in 1907, he attended Oxford University, where he became the focal point for a group of promising young writers. His first book was published the same year he graduated from Oxford, and he quickly became recognized as the most important British poet of his generation. In 1939 he emigrated to the United States, and shortly thereafter he became an American citizen. While poetry was his chief passion, he worked in other genres as well, gaining recognition as a critic and dramatist. He died in Vienna in 1973, having published a total of more than 20 works.

While his critical reputation has fluctuated slightly, both during and after his lifetime, there is little question that he was one of the most important poets writing in English during the twentieth century. Poems such as "The Shield of Achilles" and "September 1, 1939" capture the terrible political realities of that century, and the latter of the two was often quoted after the New York City terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Auden, who was noted for his wit, once remarked, "No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted."

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William Blake

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This poet was one of the great visionary poets of English literature. Born in 1757 in London, England, he early on demonstrated gifts for language and the visual arts, and as an adult he supported himself as a printer and engraver. In addition to having indisputable artistic talents, he believed that he had the ability to see spiritual realities-angels, for example-that were hidden from most people.

During his lifetime, this poet was better known as a visual artist than a writer, although Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), his two most accessible works, did enjoy some popularity. His longer, more philosophically and politically weighty works, such as Milton (1804-8) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), were more appreciated by succeeding generations than by his contemporaries. He died in 1827.

The unique poetry he created, technically innovative and complete with its own mythology, is perhaps what we should expect from the man who said, "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's."

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Robert Browning

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Born in 1812 in Camberwell, near London, England this poet was both an outstanding poet in his own right, and the husband of another well-known poet. He had just begun to establish his reputation as a poet when he met Elizabeth Barrett. The two were married in 1846, and soon moved to Venice, Italy, where they made their home until Elizabeth’s death in 1861.

Popular acclaim came slowly to this poet, and for much of his career he was less well known than his wife. Although he had published such masterpieces as “My Last Duchess” and “Fra Lippo Lippi,” before his return to England, it was only with the publication of the four volumes of The Ring and the Book in 1868 and 1869 that he achieved true success. He is now recognized as one of the greatest English poets, and as the greatest writer of dramatic monologues since Shakespeare.

In one of his early letters to his future wife, this poet modestly contrasted her poetry with his own: “You speak out, you, --I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, but I am going to try.”

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Elizabeth Bishop

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Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911, this poet was one of the most important American poets of the post-World War II era. Her father died when she was very young and her mother was confined to a mental institution, so she lived with sympathetic relatives until she went away to school. She worked for most of her life as a freelance writer and teacher. She died in Boston, of a stroke, in 1979.

this poet published only four slim volumes during her lifetime-North and South (1946), Poems: North and South-A Cold Spring (1955), Questions of Travel (1965), and Geography III (1976)-but she was praised by critics and she won a number of prestigious awards, including, in 1955, the Pulitzer Prize. Her poems are typically quiet and subtle, but their accessible language and musicality give them an instant appeal.

Personally modest and poetically restrained, she once told an interviewer, "I wish my students wouldn't spend so much time trying to 'discover' themselves. They should let other people discover them. The fact is that we always tell the truth about ourselves despite ourselves. It's just that very often we don't like how it comes out."

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Gwendolyn Brooks

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This poet was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917. She began writing poetry at an early age, and she received positive feedback from well-known poets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes while still in her teens. Her identity as an African-American was crucial to her work, and throughout her career she was deeply involved in the struggle for racial equality.

Though influenced by African-American poets such as Johnson and Hughes, this poet was also open to influences from white poets such as Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot. From this combination of diverse influences she formed a unique style that has brought her honors and acclaim. In 1950, while still in her early thirties, she won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Annie Allen. In the decades that followed, she received numerous fellowships and honorary degrees. This poet died in Chicago, Illinois, in 2000.

Throughout her career, Brooks viewed poetry and the other arts as a way of challenging and transforming the reader and society. "Art hurts," she once wrote in a poem about Pablo Picasso. "Art urges voyages."

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Lord Byron

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This poet,George Gordon, was a great poet, but he was also a larger-than-life figure who would not have been out of place in a modern soap opera. Born in London, England, in 1788, he became involved as a young man in literature, politics, and a series of sexual scandals. His reputation was that of someone who was, in the words of one of his lovers, "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." This poet was particularly interested in the various European struggles for national liberation, and it was while he was in Greece, assisting the revolution against Turkey, that he died of an illness in 1824.
His genius was recognized in his own time, though the work his contemporaries admired was not necessarily that which we value most today. Readers of the time may have preferred the dark romanticism of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818) or the Turkish Tales (1813-1814), but most modern critics would rate Don Juan (1819-1824), his comic masterpiece about the infamous seducer, as his greatest work.

Despite the inventiveness that he displayed, particularly in his longer poems, this poet once wrote, "I hate things all fiction… there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric-and pure invention is but the talent of a liar."

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E. E. Cummings

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This poet was born in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of a professor at Harvard University, the school he himself later attended. His first collection, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), established him as a promising avant-garde poet. The collection that followed, XLI Poems (1925), solidified his reputation. By the time he died in 1962, he was one of America's most-read poets.

Even on the page, This poet's poems look experimental, since he played in dramatic ways with punctuation and capitalization (or lack thereof). His subjects, on the other hand, were often traditional, and he is especially known for his love poems. While his reputation has declined in the years since his death, there are those (notably, the poet and critic Brad Leithauser) who have argued forcefully for his continuing importance.

This poet always stressed the importance of a distinct, individual vision. As he once put it, "If poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about self-styled obligations and duties and responsibilities."