Today’s poem has some strong words for the apple. Happy reading.

Happy reading.

all the bent ways to love, its mercies

practiced, its one day at a time

begun and lived and slept on and begun.”

Happy reading.

N.B. Here is a wonderful reading of the poem in Old Irish.

“…As the oldest of four children born in rapid succession, Wilfred developed a protective attitude toward the others and an especially close relationship with his mother. After he turned four, the family moved from the grandfather’s home to a modest house in Birkenhead, where Owen attended Birkenhead Institute from 1900 to 1907. The family then moved to another modest house, in Shrewsbury, where Owen attended Shrewsbury Technical School and graduated in 1911 at the age of 18. Having attempted unsuccessfully to win a scholarship to attend London University, he tried to measure his aptitude for a religious vocation by becoming an unpaid lay assistant to the Reverend Herbert Wigan, a vicar of evangelical inclinations in the Church of England, at Dunsden, Oxfordshire. In return for the tutorial instruction he was to receive, but which did not significantly materialize, Owen agreed to assist with the care of the poor and sick in the parish and to decide within two years whether he should commit himself to further training as a clergyman. At Dunsden he achieved a fuller understanding of social and economic issues and developed his humanitarian propensities, but as a consequence of this heightened sensitivity, he became disillusioned with the inadequate response of the Church of England to the sufferings of the underprivileged and the dispossessed. In his spare time, he read widely and began to write poetry. In his initial verses he wrote on the conventional subjects of the time, but his work also manifested some stylistic qualities that even then tended to set him apart, especially his keen ear for sound and his instinct for the modulating of rhythm, talents related perhaps to the musical ability that he shared with both of his parents.

In 1913 he returned home, seriously ill with a respiratory infection that his living in a damp, unheated room at the vicarage had exacerbated. He talked of poetry, music, or graphic art as possible vocational choices, but his father urged him to seek employment that would result in a steady income. After eight months of convalescence at home, Owen taught for one year in Bordeaux at the Berlitz School of Languages, and he spent a second year in France with a Catholic family, tutoring their two boys. As a result of these experiences, he became a Francophile. Later these years undoubtedly heightened his sense of the degree to which the war disrupted the life of the French populace and caused widespread suffering among civilians as the Allies pursued the retreating Germans through French villages in the summer and fall of 1918.

In September 1915, nearly a year after the United Kingdom and Germany had gone to war, Owen returned to England, uncertain as to whether he should enlist. By October he had enlisted and was at first in the Artists’ Rifles. In June 1916 he received a commission as lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, and on December 29, 1916 he left for France with the Lancashire Fusiliers.”

-via Poetry Foundation

Lee’s book is backordered at US outlets like Bookshop.org, but is in stock at Barnes & Noble and can be acquired directly from Peepal Tree Press (or in digital format from the behemoth-that-shall-not-be-named).

Today’s poem comes from a young man (he died at 25) whose Spring and Autumn were the same. Happy reading.

You can find the text of the poem here.

George Starbuck was born in Columbus, Ohio on June 15, 1931. He grew up in Illinois and California. He attended the University of California at Berkeley for two years, and the University of Chicago for three. He then studied with Archibald MacLeish and Robert Lowell, alongside peers Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, at Harvard University. Starbuck won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his collection Bone Thoughts (1960). He is the author of several other books, including The Argot Merchant Disaster: New and Selected Poems (1982), Elegy in a Country Church Yard (1974), and White Paper (1966). He taught at the State University College at Buffalo, the University of Iowa, and Boston University.

Starbuck’s witty songs of protest are usually concerned with love, war, and the spiritual temper of the times. John Holmes believed that “there hasn’t been as much word excitement ... for years,” as one finds in Bone Thoughts. Harvey Shapiro pointed out that Starbuck’s work is attractive because of its “witty, improvisational surface, slangy and familiar address, brilliant aural quality” and added that Starbuck may become a “spokesman for the bright, unhappy young men.” Louise Bogan asserted that his daring satire “sets him off from the poets of generalized rebellion.”

After reading Bone Thoughts, Holmes hoped for other books in the same vein; R.F. Clayton found that, in White Paper(1966), the verse again stings with parody. Although Robert D. Spector wasn’t sure of Starbuck’s sincerity in Bone Thoughts, he rated the poems in White Paper, which range “from parody to elegy to sonnets, and even acrostic exercises,” as “generally superior examples of their kind.” In particular, Spector wrote, when Starbuck juxtaposes McNamara’s political language and a Quaker’s self-immolation by burning, or wryly offers an academician’s praise for this nation’s demonstration of humanity by halting its bombing for “five whole days,” we sense this poet’s genuine commitment.

Starbuck died in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on August 1, 1996.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is both metrical marvel and moving memorial. Happy reading.

Known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century, Geoffrey Hill lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith. He was born in 1932 in Worcestershire, England to a working-class family. He attended Oxford University, where his work was first published by the U.S. poet Donald Hall. These poems later collected in For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 marked an astonishing debut. In dense poems of gnarled syntax and astonishing rhetorical power, Hill planted the seeds of style and concern that he cultivated over his long career. Hill’s work is noted for its seriousness, its high moral tone, extreme allusiveness and dedication to history, theology, and philosophy.

-bio via Poetry Foundation (read the full biography here)

“Poet Seamus Heaney described Holub’s writing as ‘a laying bare of things, not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull; the shape of relationships, politics, history; the rhythms of affections and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith, hope, violence, art.’ In 1988 poet Ted Hughes called Holub ‘one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere.’”

Weatherford is author of over seventy books including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry inspired, she says, by “family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles that center on African American resistance, resilience, remarkability, rejoicing and remembrance.”

-bio via Poetry Foundation

“Mark Ford summarized Graves’s ‘wholesale rejection of 20th-century civilization and complete submission to the capricious demands of the Goddess’ with a quote from The White Goddess: ‘Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.’”

-via Poetry Foundation

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Known as Julie, she was the second of ten children of the Rev. Alfred Gatty, Vicar of Ecclesfield in Yorkshire, and Margaret Gatty, who was herself a children's author. Their children were educated mainly by their mother, but Julie was often the driving force behind their various activities: drama, botany and so on. Later she was responsible for setting up a village library in Ecclesfield, and helped out in the parish with her three sisters. Early stories of hers appeared in Charlotte Mary Yonge's magazine The Monthly Packet.

On 1 June 1867, Julie married Major Alexander Ewing(1830–1895) of the Army Pay Corps. A musician, composer and translator, he was also a keen churchgoer and shared his wife's interest in literature. Within a week of their marriage, the Ewings left England for Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, where he had received a new posting. They remained there for two years, before returning to England in 1869 and spending eight years in the army town of Aldershot. Although her husband was sent overseas again, to Malta in 1879 and Sri Lanka in 1881, Ewing's poor health precluded her from accompanying him.

On her husband's return in 1883, the Ewings moved to Trull, Somerset, and then in 1885 to Bath, in the hopes that the change of air would do her good. However, her health continued to decline. After two operations, she died in Bath on 13 May 1885. She was given a military funeral at Trull three days later.

Julie's sister Horatia Katharine Frances Gatty (1846–1945) published a memorial of her life and works, which includes a publication history of her stories. A later selection includes some of Julie's letters and drawings about Canada. A biography of her by Gillian Avery appeared in 1961.

-bio via Wikipedia

His heroes were Wordsworth, Hardy and Causley. His own poetry, which rhymed and was perfectly accessible, was distinguished by, in his words, its "shrewd, ironic and Horatian tone". It ranged from accomplished light verse, which was often very funny, to deeply affecting poems about family bereavement. He appeared in the Faber Poetry Introduction 6 (1985).

Simon was born in Burnley, Lancashire, the son of Susan, an English teacher, and the Rev Douglas Curtis, a vicar, and grew up in Northamptonshire. Armed with an English degree from Cambridge University, and a PhD from Essex, on Darwin as writer and scientist, he became a lecturer in comparative literature at Manchester University. He was active in the Hardy Society, editing the Thomas Hardy Journal for several years, worked quietly for the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and spent a lot of time caring for his mother, who lived to a great age.

Eventually, he moved to Plymouth and in 2010 took over from me as the editor of the little magazine The Interpreter's House, which he made, in Hardy's phrase, "a house of hospitalities". We were both determined that it shouldn't be just a platform for the editor's friends but should be open to good poets of all stripes.

But early in 2013 all plans had to be shelved as this active outdoor man was diagnosed with incurable cancer. Though paralysed below the waist, he remained positive, continued to watch the yellowhammers outside his window and never allowed his many visitors to feel downhearted. Shoestring Press rushed out a volume of his new and selected poems, Comet Over Greens Norton, which contains all his best work.

Simon was old-fashioned in the best kind of ways, a former 1960s student who canvassed for Labour but who dressed conservatively and retained a stiff upper lip and immaculate manners. He hated pollution, literary infighting, and public greed and waste. He loved bird-watching, football, woodcuts and the Lake District.

-bio via Merryn Williams’ 2014 Obituary for Curtis in The Guardian

Wojahn’s book World Tree (2011) received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His collection Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004 (2006), which Peter Campion called “superb” and “panoramic” in a review for Poetry, showcases Wojahn’s formal range, the scope of his personal narratives, and his intense, imaginative monologues and character sketches, such as his sonnets on pop culture icons and rock-and-roll musicians in Mystery Train (1990). He is also celebrated for the emotional resonance of his poetry—the ability to, in the words of poet Jean Valentine, “follow … tragedy to its grave depths, with dignity and unsparingness, and egolessness.”

In addition to his books of poetry, Wojahn is the author of From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poetry (2015) and Strange Good Fortune (2001), a collection of essays on contemporary poetry. He coedited A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry (1991), and edited a posthumous collection of his wife Lynda Hull’s poetry, The Only World (1995).

Wojahn has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Indiana Arts Commission. He teaches poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the low residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Bert Leston Taylor (November 13, 1866 – March 19, 1921) was an American columnist, humorist, poet, and author.

Bert Leston Taylor became a journalist at seventeen, a librettist at twenty-one, and a successfully published author at thirty-five. At the height of his literary career, he was a central literary figure of the early 20th century Chicago renaissance as well as one of the most celebrated columnists in the United States.

-bio via Wikipedia

-bio via Paraclete Press

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Bill Knott was born on February 17, 1940, in Carson City, Michigan. When he was seven years old, his mother died in childbirth, and his father passed away three years later. He grew up in an orphanage in Mooseheart, Illinois, and on an uncle’s farm. In the late 1950s, he joined the U.S. Army and, after serving his full enlistment, was honorably discharged in 1960.

In the early 1960s, Knott moved to Chicago, where he worked as a hospital orderly. There, he became involved in the poetry scene and worked with John Logan, Paul Carroll, Charles Simic, and other poets. He published his first book, The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans (Big Table, 1968), under the pseudonym Saint Geraurd in 1968. He also published Nights of Naomi (Barn Dream Press, 1971) and Auto-necrophilia (Big Table, 1971) under the same name.

Knott went on to publish several poetry collections under his own name, including I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960–2014 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), edited by Thomas Lux; Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999 (BOA Editions, 2000); Becos (Random House, 1983); and Love Poems to Myself (Barn Dream Press, 1974). He also self-published many books and posted all of his poems online, where they could be read for free.

Of his work, Lux writes, “As dense as some of his poems can be, they rarely defeat comprehensibility. Some are so lucid and straightforward, they are like a punch in the gut, or one’s first great kiss…. His intense focus on every syllable, and the sound of every syllable in relation to nearby sounds, is so skilled that the poems often seem casual: Art hides art.”

Knott taught at Emerson College for over twenty-five years. He received the Iowa Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors and awards. He died on March 12, 2014, in Bay City, Michigan.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, CBE (17 February 1864 – 5 February 1941) was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author, widely considered one of the greatest writers of Australia's colonial period.

Born in rural New South Wales, Paterson worked as a lawyer before transitioning into literature, where he quickly gained recognition for capturing the life of the Australian bush. A representative of the Bulletin School of Australian literature, Paterson wrote many of his best known poems for the nationalist journal The Bulletin, including "Clancy of the Overflow" (1889) and "The Man from Snowy River" (1890). His 1895 ballad "Waltzing Matilda" is regarded widely as Australia's unofficial national anthem and, according to the National Film and Sound Archive, has been recorded more than any other Australian song.

-bio via Wikipedia

His books have been published in different countries in Europe and America and translated into several languages. He has received some of the most prestigious awards for poetry in Spanish, including the Federico García Lorca, the Emilio Alarcos del Principado de Asturias and the Antonio Machado. His last book, The Insistence of Harm, received the Book of the Year award from the Latino American Writers Institute of the City University of New York.

For ten years he has worked as a journalist for the Spanish newspaper El País. He directs the International Festival of Poetry in Granada and is a professor at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, EEUU).

His last bilingual book, America, has been published by Copper Canyon Press with translation by Carolyn Forché.

In 2022, Fernando Valverde published the first biography of the poet Percy B. Shelley in Spanish and in 2024 he published a monumental biography of Lord Byron. Valverde is considered one of the greatest specialists in Romanticism today.

-bio via FernandoValverde.com

Marya Zaturensky, Russian-born American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born on September 12, 1902, in Kiev, Russia (now Ukraine). She emigrated to the United States with her family in 1909 and was educated in New York public schools; attended Valparaiso University, 1922–23; graduated from University of Wisconsin, 1925. The same year she married Horace Gregory (a poet and critic), and had two children: Joanna and Patrick.

Zaturensky won the John Reed Memorial Award from Poetry magazine (1922), the Shelley Memorial Award (1935), the Guarantors Award from Poetry magazine (1937), and finally the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938.

Leigh, son of James Mathews Leigh, was born in London on 29 March 1837. At an early age he engaged in literary pursuits. From time to time appeared collections of his lyrics, under the titles of Carols of Cockayne, 1869 (several editions); Gillott and Goosequill, 1871; A Town Garland: a Collection of Lyrics, 1878; and Strains from the Strand: Trifles in Verse, 1882. His verse was always fluent, but otherwise of very slender merit.

For the stage he translated many French comic operas. His first theatrical essay was in collaboration with Charles Millward in a musical spectacle for the Theatre Royal in Birmingham. His ‘Falsacappa,’ music by Offenbach, was produced at the Globe Theatre on 22 April 1871; ‘Le Roi Carotte’ at the Alhambra on 3 June 1872; ‘Bridge of Sighs,’ opera-bouffe, at the St. James's, 18 Nov. 1872; ‘White Cat,’ a fairy spectacle, at the Queen's, Long Acre, on 2 Dec. 1875; ‘Voyage dans la Lune,’ opera-bouffe, at the Alhambra, on 15 April 1876; ‘Fatinitza,’ opera-bouffe (the words were printed), adapted from the German, at the Alhambra on 20 June 1878; ‘The Great Casimir,’ a vaudeville, at the Gaiety, on 27 Sept. 1879; ‘Cinderella,’ an opera, with music by J. Farmer, at St. James's Hall, on 2 May 1884 (the words were published in 1882); ‘The Brigands,’ by H. Meilhac and L. Halévy, adapted to English words by Leigh, was printed in 1884. For ‘Lurette,’ a comic opera, Avenue, 24 March 1883, he wrote the lyrics; and with Robert Reece he produced ‘La Petite Mademoiselle,’ comic opera, Alhambra, on 6 October 1879. He edited ‘Jeux d'Esprit written and spoken by French and English Wits and Humorists,’ in 1877, and wrote Mark Twain's ‘Nightmares’ in 1878.

His last theatrical venture—a complete failure—was ‘The Prince Methusalem,’ a comic opera, brought out at the Folies Dramatiques (now the Kingsway), Great Queen Street, London, on 19 May 1883. He was a Spanish, Portuguese, and French scholar, a brilliant and witty conversationalist, and a humorous singer.

He died in his rooms in Lowther's private hotel, 35 Strand, London, on 16 June 1883, and was buried in Brompton cemetery on 22 June.

-bio via Wikipedia

William Cowper (1731-1800) was a renowned 18th century poet, hymnographer, and translator of Homer. His most famous works include his 5000-line poem ‘The Task’ and some charming and light-hearted verses, not least ‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’. Phrases he coined such as ‘Variety is the spice of life’ are still in popular use today. While living in Olney he collaborated on ‘The Olney Hymns’ with his friend John Newton.

-bio via the Cowper and Newton Museum

Larry Richman (1934-2023) was born in Philadelphia and grew up on a small Bucks County chicken farm north of the city. He attended local schools and then Colorado College, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with a BA in English in 1957. From Duke University, he received an MA in 1959 and a PhD in 1970.

Larry went on to teach English at the Beaufort and Florence Centers of the University of South Carolina, Washington & Lee University, Agnes Scott College, Virginia Intermont College, and Virginia Highlands Community College, from which he retired as professor emeritus of English in 1998. He also served briefly as adjunct faculty for Vermont College.

Larry was one of the founding editors of a nationally distributed poetry quarterly, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. He and his wife, Ann, were editor-publishers of the Sow’s Ear Press, which published 30 collections by poets from the upper South between 1994 and 2003. He was also one of the founders and the associate editor and advertising director of The Plow, an Appalachian alternative newsmagazine published by the nonprofit Appalachian Information. The magazine ran for four years in the late 1970s, producing a total of 72 issues.

Walter de la Mare, born on April 25, 1873 in London, is considered one of modern literature’s chief exemplars of the romantic imagination. His complete works form a sustained treatment of romantic themes: dreams, death, rare states of mind and emotion, fantasy worlds of childhood, and the pursuit of the transcendent.

As a youth he attended St. Paul’s Cathedral School, and his formal education did not extend beyond this point. Upon graduation he went to work for the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company, remaining with the firm for 18 years. De la Mare began writing short stories and poetry while working as a bookkeeper in the company’s London office during the 1890s. His first published short story, “Kismet,” appeared in the journal Sketch in 1895. In 1902 he published his first major work, the poetry collection Songs of Childhood, which was recognized as a significant example of children’s literature for its creative imagery and variety of meters. Critics often assert that a childlike richness of imagination influenced everything de la Mare wrote, emphasizing his frequent depiction of childhood as a time of intuition, deep emotion, and closeness to spiritual truth. In 1908, following the publication of his novel Henry Brocken and the poetry collection titled Poems, de la Mare was granted a Civil List pension, enabling him to terminate his corporate employment and focus exclusively on writing.

….As a poet de la Mare is often compared with Thomas Hardy and William Blake for their respective themes of mortality and visionary illumination. His greatest concern was the creation of a dreamlike tone implying a tangible but nonspecific transcendent reality. This characteristic of the poems has drawn many admirers, though also eliciting criticism that the poet indulged in an undefined sense of mystery without systematic acceptance of any specific doctrine. Some commentators also criticize the poetry for having an archness of tone more suitable for children’s verse, while others value this playful quality. It is generally agreed, however, that de la Mare was a skillful manipulator of poetic structure, a skill that is particularly evident in the earlier collections.

….For his extravagance of invention de la Mare is sometimes labeled an escapist who retreats from accepted definitions of reality and the relationships of conventional existence. His approach to reality, however, is not escapist; rather, it profoundly explores the world he considered most significant—that of the imagination. In the London Mercury J.B. Priestley favorably concluded in 1924 that de la Mare is “one of that most lovable order of artists who never lose sight of their childhood, but re-live it continually in their work and contrive to find expression for their maturity in it, memories and impressions, its romantic vision of the world.”

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Wright received a Whiting Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He translated poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke and Rene Char; in 2008 he and his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, co-translated a collection by the Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, Factory of Tears. He taught at Emerson College and other universities, worked in mental health clinics, and volunteered at a center for grieving children. His father was the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet James Wright. He died in 2015.

(Nota bene: If you are ready for your own copy of Lyrical Ballads, the Oxford World Classics edition is a great way to see the developments across early editions.)

Jonathan Kerr of the Wordsworth Trust writes about the revolutionary context of the Lyrical Ballads and the revolutionary nature of the project itself:

“Wordsworth and Coleridge’s first major literary undertaking and a pioneering work of English Romanticism – came into being at a tumultuous moment in England’s history…Not since the English Revolution had the country faced such alarming upheaval and discord within its borders.On first glance it might not seem like the little collection authored by Wordsworth and Coleridge has much to do with this heady and factional atmosphere. Lyrical Ballads came about in the spring and summer of 1798, when the Coleridge and Wordsworth families lived as neighbours in the secluded village of Holford, Somerset. Wordsworth and Coleridge had only known one another a short time, but they became quick friends and mutually-admiring colleagues. The small village provided both poets with a break from the spirited goings-on of cities like London and Bristol, which could often be dangerous places for young men with unorthodox opinions. Coleridge and Wordsworth, both committed reformers through the early years of the French Revolution, knew this is as well as anybody, and their retreat into the country was motivated as much by concerns for their personal security as anything else.

…Whether or not Wordsworth and Coleridge continued to sympathize with the revolution abroad, there can be little doubt that with Lyrical Ballads the two were committed to one kind of revolution at least, a revolution in the sphere of poetry and art. Lyrical Ballads is among other things an attempt to purify poetry of the cold conventions which had come to dominate the literary scene, at least according to both poets; in place of this, Wordsworth and Coleridge wanted to bring poetry back to what is most common and recognizable, and also most important, within our emotional, social, and imaginative lives. If this doesn’t seem like such an extraordinary undertaking today, this might owe to the remarkable success of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s quiet revolution on the literary front.”

Goldsmith was the son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, curate in charge of Kilkenny West, County Westmeath. At about the time of his birth, the family moved into a substantial house at nearby Lissoy, where Oliver spent his childhood. Much has been recorded concerning his youth, his unhappy years as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received the B.A. degree in February 1749, and his many misadventures before he left Ireland in the autumn of 1752 to study in the medical school at Edinburgh. His father was now dead, but several of his relations had undertaken to support him in his pursuit of a medical degree. Later on, in London, he came to be known as Dr. Goldsmith—Doctor being the courtesy title for one who held the Bachelor of Medicine—but he took no degree while at Edinburgh nor, so far as anyone knows, during the two-year period when, despite his meagre funds, which were eventually exhausted, he somehow managed to make his way through Europe. The first period of his life ended with his arrival in London, bedraggled and penniless, early in 1756.

Goldsmith’s rise from total obscurity was a matter of only a few years. He worked as an apothecary’s assistant, school usher, physician, and as a hack writer—reviewing, translating, and compiling. Much of his work was for Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review. It remains amazing that this young Irish vagabond, unknown, uncouth, unlearned, and unreliable, was yet able within a few years to climb from obscurity to mix with aristocrats and the intellectual elite of London. Such a rise was possible because Goldsmith had one quality, soon noticed by booksellers and the public, that his fellow literary hacks did not possess—the gift of a graceful, lively, and readable style. His rise began with the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), a minor work. Soon he emerged as an essayist, in The Bee and other periodicals, and above all in his Chinese Letters. These essays were first published in the journal The Public Ledger and were collected as The Citizen of the World in 1762. The same year brought his Life of Richard Nash, of Bath, Esq. Already Goldsmith was acquiring those distinguished and often helpful friends whom he alternately annoyed and amused, shocked and charmed—Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Percy, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and James Boswell. The obscure drudge of 1759 became in 1764 one of the nine founder-members of the famous Club, a select body, including Reynolds, Johnson, and Burke, which met weekly for supper and talk. Goldsmith could now afford to live more comfortably, but his extravagance continually ran him into debt, and he was forced to undertake more hack work. He thus produced histories of England and of ancient Rome and Greece, biographies, verse anthologies, translations, and works of popular science. These were mainly compilations of works by other authors, which Goldsmith then distilled and enlivened by his own gift for fine writing. Some of these makeshift compilations went on being reprinted well into the 19th century, however.

By 1762 Goldsmith had established himself as an essayist with his Citizen of the World, in which he used the device of satirizing Western society through the eyes of an Oriental visitor to London. By 1764 he had won a reputation as a poet with The Traveller, the first work to which he put his name. It embodied both his memories of tramping through Europe and his political ideas. In 1770 he confirmed that reputation with the more famous Deserted Village, which contains charming vignettes of rural life while denouncing the evictions of the country poor at the hands of wealthy landowners. In 1766 Goldsmith revealed himself as a novelist with The Vicar of Wakefield (written in 1762), a portrait of village life whose idealization of the countryside, sentimental moralizing, and melodramatic incidents are underlain by a sharp but good-natured irony. In 1768 Goldsmith turned to the theatre with The Good Natur’d Man, which was followed in 1773 by the much more effective She Stoops to Conquer, which was immediately successful. This play has outlived almost all other English-language comedies from the early 18th to the late 19th century by virtue of its broadly farcical horseplay and vivid, humorous characterizations.

During his last decade Goldsmith’s conversational encounters with Johnson and others, his foolishness, and his wit were preserved in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Goldsmith eventually became deeply embroiled in mounting debts despite his considerable earnings as an author, though, and after a short illness in the spring of 1774 he died.

-bio via Britannica

David Wagoner was recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body of work. He won numerous prestigious literary awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and was nominated twice for the National Book Award. The author of ten acclaimed novels, Wagoner’s fiction has been awarded the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. Professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Wagoner enjoyed an excellent reputation as both a writer and a teacher of writing. He was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and was the editor of Poetry Northwest until 2002.Born in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Midwesterner Wagoner was initially influenced by family ties, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial production and pollution, and the urban environment. His move to the Pacific Northwest in 1954, at Roethke’s urging, changed both his outlook and his poetry. Writing in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner recalls: “when I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe. I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I’d tried to grow up.” Wagoner’s poetry often mourns the loss of a natural, fertile wilderness, though David K. Robinson, writing in Contemporary Poetry, described the themes of “survival, anger at those who violate the natural world” and “a Chaucerian delight in human oddity” at work in the poems as well. Critics have also praised Wagoner’s poetry for its crisp descriptive detail and metaphorical bent. However, Paul Breslin in the New York Times Book Review pronounced David Wagoner to be “predominantly a nature poet…as Frost and Roethke were nature poets.”Wagoner’s first books, including Dry Sun, Dry Wind (1953), A Place to Stand (1958), and Poems (1959), demonstrate an early mastery of his chosen subject matter and form. Often comprised of observations of nature, Wagoner links his speakers’ predicaments and estrangement to the larger imperfection of the world. In Wagoner’s second book, A Place to Stand,Roethke’s influence is clear, and the book uses journey poems to represent the poet’s own quest back to his beginnings. Wagoner’s fourth book, The Nesting Ground (1963), reflects his relocation physically, aesthetically and emotionally; the Midwest is abandoned for the lush abundance of the Pacific Northwest, and Wagoner’s style is less concerned with lamentation or complaint and more with cataloguing the bounty around him. James K. Robinson called the title poem from Staying Alive (1966) “one of the best American poems since World War II.” In poems like “The Words,” Wagoner discovers harmony with nature by learning to be open to all it has to offer: “I take what is: / The light beats on the stones, / the wind over water shines / Like long grass through the trees, / As I set loose, like birds / in a landscape, the old words.” Robert Cording, who called Staying Alive “the volume where Wagoner comes into his own as a poet,” believed that for Wagoner, taking what is involves “an acceptance of our fragmented selves, which through love we are always trying to patch together; an acceptance of our own darkness; and an acceptance of the world around us with which we must reacquaint ourselves.”Collected Poems 1956-1976 (1976) was nominated for the National Book Award and praised by X. J. Kennedy in Parnassus for offering poems which are “beautifully clear; not merely comprehensible, but clear in the sense that their contents are quickly visible.” Yet it was Who Shall Be the Sun? (1978),based upon Native American myth and legend, which gained critical attention. Hayden Carruth, writing in Harper’s Magazine, called the book “a remarkable achievement,” not only for its presentation of “the literalness of shamanistic mysticism” but also for “its true feeling.” Hudson Review’s James Finn Cotter also noted how Wagoner “has not written translations but condensed versions that avoid stereotyped language….The voice is Wagoner’s own, personal, familiar, concerned. He has achieved a remarkable fusion of nature, legend and psyche in these poems.”In Broken Country (1979), also nominated for the National Book Award, shows Wagoner honing the instructional backpacking poems he had first used in Staying Alive. Leonard Neufeldt, writing in New England Review,called “the love lyrics” of the first section “among the finest since Williams’ ‘Asphodel.’” Wagoner has been accused of using staid pastoral conventions in book after book, as well as writing less well about human subjects. However, his books have continued to receive critical attention, often recognized for the ways in which they use encounters with nature as metaphors for encounters with the self. First Light (1983), Wagoner’s “most intense” collection, according to James K. Robinson, reflects Wagoner’s third marriage to poet Robin Seyfried. And Publishers Weekly celebrated Walt Whitman Bathing (1996) for its use of “plainspoken formal virtuosity” which allows for “a pragmatic clarity of perception.” A volume of new and collected poems, Traveling Light, was released in 1999. Sampling Wagoner’s work through the years, many reviewers found the strongest poems to also be the newest. Rochelle Ratner in Library Journal noted “since many of the best are in the ‘New Poems’ section, it might make sense to wait for his next volume.” That next volume, The House of Song (2002) won high praise for its variety of subject matter and pitch-perfect craft. Christina Pugh in Poetry declared “The House of Song boasts a superb architecture, and each one of its rooms (or in Italian, stanzas) affords a pleasure that enhances the last.” In 2008 Wagoner published his twenty-third collection of verse, A Map of the Night. Reviewing the book for the Seattle Times, Sheila Farr found many poems shot through with nostalgia, adding “the book feels like a summing-up.” Conceding that “not all the work reaches the high plane of Wagoner’s reputation,” Farr described its “finest moments” as those which “resonate with the title, venturing into darkness and helping us recognize its familiar places.”

In addition to his numerous books of poetry, David Wagoner was also a successful novelist, writing both mainstream fiction and regional Western fiction. Offering a steady mix of drama seasoned with occasional comedy, Wagoner’s tales often involve a naive central character’s encounter with and acceptance of human failing and social corruption. In the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner described his first novel, The Man in the Middle (1954), as “a thriller with some Graham Greene overtones about a railroad crossing watchmen in violent political trouble in Chicago,” his second novel, Money, Money, Money (1955), as a story about “a young tree surgeon who can’t touch, look at, or even think about money, though he has a lot of it,” his third novel, Rock (1958) as a tale of “teenage Chicago delinquents,” and his fifth novel, Baby, Come On Inside (1968) as a story “about an aging popular singer who’d lost his voice.” As a popular novelist, however, Wagoner is best known for The Escape Artist (1965), the story of an amateur magician and the unscrupulous adults who attempt to exploit him, which was adapted as a film in 1981. Wagoner produced four successful novels as a Western “regional” writer. Structurally and thematically, they bear similarities to his other novels. David W. Madden noted in Twentieth-Century Western Writers: “Central to each of these [Western] works is a young protagonist’s movement from innocence to experience as he journeys across the American frontier encountering an often debased and corrupted world. However, unlike those he meets, the hero retains his fundamental optimism and incorruptibility.”Although Wagoner wrote numerous novels, his reputation rests on his numerous, exquisitely crafted poetry collections, and his dedication as a teacher. Harold Bloom said of Wagoner: “His study of American nostalgias is as eloquent as that of James Wright, and like Wright’s poetry carries on some of the deepest currents in American verse.” And Leonard Neufeldt called Wagoner “simply, one of the most accomplished poets currently at work in and with America…His range and mastery of subjects, voices, and modes, his ability to work with ease in any of the modes (narrative, descriptive, dramatic, lyric, anecdotal) and with any number of species (elegy, satirical portraiture, verse editorial, apostrophe, jeremiad, and childlike song, to name a few) and his frequent combinations of a number of these into astonishingly compelling orchestrations provide us with an intelligent and convincing definition of genius.”

Wagoner died in late 2021 at age 95.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Her honors and awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Carolyn Kizer Prize, and J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize as well as a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she works as a copy editor.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

In May 1915, Sassoon was commissioned into the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and went to France. He impressed many with his bravery in the front line and was given the nickname 'Mad Jack' for his near-suicidal exploits. He was decorated twice. His brother Hamo was killed in November 1915 at Gallipoli.

In the summer of 1916, Sassoon was sent to England to recover from fever. He went back to the front, but was wounded in April 1917 and returned home. Meetings with several prominent pacifists, including Bertrand Russell, had reinforced his growing disillusionment with the war and in June 1917 he wrote a letter that was published in the Times in which he said that the war was being deliberately and unnecessarily prolonged by the government. As a decorated war hero and published poet, this caused public outrage. It was only his friend and fellow poet, Robert Graves, who prevented him from being court-martialled by convincing the authorities that Sassoon had shell-shock. He was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. Here he met, and greatly influenced, Wilfred Owen. Both men returned to the front where Owen was killed in 1918. Sassoon was posted to Palestine and then returned to France, where he was again wounded, spending the remainder of the war in England. Many of his war poems were published in 'The Old Huntsman' (1917) and 'Counter-Attack' (1918).

After the war Sassoon spent a brief period as literary editor of the Daily Herald before going to the United States, travelling the length and breadth of the country on a speaking tour. He then started writing the near-autobiographical novel 'Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man' (1928). It was an immediate success, and was followed by others including 'Memoirs of an Infantry Officer' (1930) and 'Sherston's Progress' (1936). Sassoon had a number of homosexual affairs but in 1933 surprised many of his friends by marrying Hester Gatty. They had a son, George, but the marriage broke down after World War Two.

He continued to write both prose and poetry. In 1957, he was received into the Catholic church. He died on 1 September 1967.

-bio via BBC

“The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.”

-Seamus Heaney, in his 1995 Nobel acceptance speech

Thomas Parnell (11 September 1679 – 24 October 1718) was an Anglo-Irish poet and clergyman who was a friend of both Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.

He was born in Dublin, the eldest son of Thomas Parnell (died 1685) of Maryborough, Queen's County (now Portlaoise, County Laois), a prosperous landowner who had been a loyal supporter of Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War and moved from Congleton, Cheshire to Ireland after the Restoration of Charles II. His mother was Anne Grice of Kilosty, County Tipperary: she also owned property in County Armagh, which she left to Thomas at her death in 1709. His parents married in Dublin in 1674. Thomas was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and collated as Archdeacon of Clogher in 1705. In the last years of the reign of Queen Anne of England he was a popular preacher, but her death put an end to his hope of career advancement. He married Anne (Nancy) Minchin, daughter of Thomas Minchin, who died in 1712, and had three children, two of whom died young. The third child, a girl, is said to have reached a great age. The marriage was a very happy one, and it has been said that Thomas never recovered from Nancy's early death.

He spent much of his time in London, where he participated with Pope, Swift and others in the Scriblerus Club, contributing to The Spectator and aiding Pope in his translation of The Iliad. He was also one of the so-called "Graveyard poets": his 'A Night-Piece on Death,' widely considered the first "Graveyard School" poem, was published posthumously in Poems on Several Occasions, collected and edited by Alexander Pope and is thought by some scholars to have been published in December 1721. It is said of his poetry, "it was in keeping with his character, easy and pleasing, enunciating the common places with felicity and grace."

-bio via Wikipedia

-bio via Paraclete Press

Richard Henry Horne (1802-1884), poet, was born on 31 December 1802 at Edmonton, near London, the eldest of three sons of James Horne (d.1810), quarter-master in the 61st Regiment; his grandfather was Richard Horne, secretary to Earl St Vincent. Richard was brought up at the home of his rich paternal grandmother and attended John Clarke's School where John Keats was also a pupil. In April 1819 Horne entered Sandhurst Military College but left in December 1820. In 1823 after reading Shelley's Queen Mab, he decided to become a poet.

In 1825 Horne sailed as midshipman in the Libertad to fight for Mexican independence. After two years in America he returned to London, where in 1833 he published his first book Exposition of the False Medium and Barriers Excluding Men of Genius from the Public. In the next decade he published three poetic dramas, contributed prolifically to literary magazines, edited the Monthly Repository in 1836-37 and served on the royal commission on child employment in factories in 1841. His most famous year was 1843 when he published his epic Orion at a farthing a copy to show his contempt for public taste. It ran to six editions in a year and made him a celebrity. During the Irish famine he was correspondent for the Daily News. In 1847 he married Catherine, daughter of David Foggo.

In 1852 Horne faced a crisis: his marriage was failing; he was impoverished; he was discontented in his work on Charles Dickens's Household Words; and he was torn between the practical and poetic sides of his nature. Tempted by dreams of fortune on the Australian goldfields and a chance to escape, Horne arrived at Melbourne in September. He soon became commander of the private gold escort and in 1853 assistant gold commissioner at Heathcote and Waranga. He was erratic in both posts and was dismissed in November 1854. By 1855 his English ties were severed, his wife having requested a formal separation. In Melbourne he became clerk to (Sir) Archibald Michie, and lived with a Scottish girl; their son, born in 1857, died after seven months. In September 1856 as a radical Horne contested Rodney in the Legislative Assembly but lost. As a commissioner of sewerage and water supply in 1857 when Melbourne's new reservoir was under public attack, he did little to appease the critics. By 1860 he was again unemployed and living at St Kilda with a female companion. He was well known at Captain Kenney's swimming baths, lectured at Mechanics' Institutes on 'The Causes of Success in Life' and failed to win the Belfast (Port Fairy) seat. He helped to found the Tahbilk vineyard on the Goulburn River. In 1862-63 the Royal Literary Fund assisted him.

In June 1863 Horne was made warden of the Victorian Blue Mountain goldfield near Trentham: 'my Siberia'. Again he began to write seriously and found tranquillity. On visits to Melbourne he held court at Henry Dwight's bookshop, and became friendly with George Gordon McCrae and Marcus Clarke. In 1864 he published a lyrical drama, Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, and in 1866 for the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition a masque, The South Sea Sisters; it contained a rhythmic representation of an Aboriginal corroboree which brought acclaim. In 1867 he celebrated the arrival of the Duke of Edinburgh with a cantata, Galatea Secunda, signing himself Richard Hengist Horne, the name by which he was henceforth known. In Australia he produced no significant poetry but some good prose: Australian Facts and Prospects(London, 1859), and an essay, 'An Election Contest in Australia' in Cornhill, 5 (1862). Disillusioned, he sailed in June 1869 for England where he became a literary doyen, producing many new works all artistically worthless. His poverty was relieved in 1874 by a government pension, and he died at Margate on 13 March 1884.

-bio via Australian Dictionary of Biography

Edward Lear, the British poet and painter known for his absurd wit, was born on May 12, 1812, in Highgate, England, a suburb of London, and began his career as an artist at age fifteen. His father, a stockbroker of Danish origin, was sent to debtor’s prison when Lear was thirteen, forcing the young Lear to earn a living. Lear quickly gained recognition for his work and, in 1832, was hired by the London Zoological Society to execute illustrations of birds. In the same year, the Earl of Derby invited him to reside at his estate; Lear ended up staying until 1836.

Lear’s first book of poems, A Book of Nonsense (Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1846) was composed for the grandchildren of the Derby household. Around 1836, Lear decided to devote himself exclusively to landscape painting, although he continued to compose light verse. Between 1837 and 1847, Lear traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia.

After his return to England, Lear’s travel journals were published in several volumes as The Illustrated Travels of a Landscape Painter. Popular and respected in his day, Lear’s travel books have largely been ignored in the twentieth century. Rather, Lear is remembered for his humorous poems, such as “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and as the creator of the form and meter of the modern limerick. Like his younger peer Lewis Carroll, Lear wrote many deeply fantastical poems about imaginary creatures, such as “The Dong with the Luminous Nose.” His books of humorous verse also include Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (James R. Osgood and Company, 1871) and Laughable Lyrics: a Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, &c.(Robert John Bush, 1877).

Edward Lear died on January 29, 1888, in San Remo, Italy, at the age of seventy-six.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California on April 12, 1952, to working-class Mexican American parents. As a teenager and college student, he worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, chopping beets and cotton and picking grapes. He was not academically motivated as a child, but he became interested in poetry during his high school years. He attended Fresno City College and California State University–Fresno, and he earned an MFA from the University of California–Irvine in 1976.His first collection of poems, The Elements of San Joaquin (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1976 and was published in 1977. Since then, Soto has published numerous books of poetry, including You Kiss by th’ Book: New Poems from Shakespeare’s Line (Chronicle Books, 2016), A Simple Plan (Chronicle Books, 2007), and New and Selected Poems (Chronicle Books, 1995), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.Soto cites his major literary influences as Edward Field, Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Christopher Durang, and E. V. Lucas. Of his work, the writer Joyce Carol Oates has said, “Gary Soto’s poems are fast, funny, heartening, and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters, or snatches of music heard out of a passing car; patches of beauty like patches of sunlight; the very pulse of a life.”Soto has also written three novels, including Amnesia in a Republican County (University of New Mexico Press, 2003); a memoir, Living Up the Street (Strawberry Hill Press, 1985); and numerous young adult and children’s books. For the Los Angeles Opera, he wrote the libretto to Nerdlandia, an opera.Soto has received the Andrew Carnegie Medal and fellowships from the California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Northern California.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Anne Brontë (17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849) was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family.

Anne Brontë was the daughter of Maria (néeBranwell) and Patrick Brontë, a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England. Anne lived most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire Dales. Otherwise, she attended a boarding school in Mirfield between 1836 and 1837, and between 1839 and 1845 lived elsewhere working as a governess. In 1846, she published a book of poems with her sisters and later two novels, initially under the pen name Acton Bell. Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in 1847 at the same time as Wuthering Heights by her sister Emily Brontë. Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was published in 1848. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is often considered one of the first feminist novels.

Anne died at 29, most likely of pulmonary tuberculosis. After her death, her sister Charlotte edited Agnes Grey to fix issues with its first edition, but prevented republication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. As a result, Anne is not as well known as her sisters. Nonetheless, both of her novels are considered classics of English literature.

-bio via Wikipedia

Zbigniew Herbert was born on October 29, 1924, in Poland in the city of Lvov, which is now a part of the Ukraine. His grandfather was an Englishman who settled in Lvov to teach English. His father, a former member of the Legions that had fought for restoration of Poland’s independence, was a bank manager. Herbert’s formal education began in Lvov and continued under German occupation in the form of clandestine study at the underground King John Casimir University, where he majored in Polish literature. He was a member of the underground resistance movement. In 1944, he moved to Krakow, and three years later he graduated from the University of Krakow with a master’s degree in economics. He also received a law degree from Nicholas Copernicus University in Torun and studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw under Henryk Elzenberg.

During the 1950s, Herbert worked at many low-paying jobs because he refused to write within the framework of official Communist guidelines. After widespread riots against Soviet control in 1956 brought about a political “thaw,” Herbert became an administrator at the Union of Polish Composers and published his first collection, Struna swiatla [The Chord of Light] (Czytelnik, 1956). The book immediately placed him among the most prominent representatives of the “Contemporaries” (young poets and writers associated with the weekly Contemporary Times).

In 1957, Herbert published his second collection of verse, Hermes, pies i gwiazda [Hermes, the Dog and the Star] (Czytelnik). Four years later, he published his third book of poems, Studium przedmiotu [Study of the Object] (Czytelnik, 1961). In 1968, his Selected Poems, translated into English by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott, was released in both the United States and England, making Herbert one of the most popular contemporary poets in the English-speaking world. In 1971, he released the first Polish edition of Selected Poems.

Herbert’s 1983 collection, Raport z oblezonego miasta i inne wiersze [Report from the Besieged City] (Instytut Literacki), dealt with the ethical problems Poland faced while under martial law. The book was issued simultaneously through an emigré publishing house and as an underground edition in Poland. He also published a number of essay collections and works of drama. In 1962, he released his famous work, Barbarzyńca wogrodzie [Barbarian in the Garden] (Czytelnik), which was eventually translated into numerous languages.

Herbert’s numerous awards include the Kościelski Foundation Prize, the Austrian Lenau Prize, the Alfred Jurzykowski Prize, the Herder Prize, the Petrarch Prize, the Bruno Schulz Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.

Herbert was a coeditor of the poetry journal Poezja from 1965 to 1968 but resigned in protest of antisemitic policies. He traveled widely throughout the West and lived in Paris, Berlin, and the United States, where he taught briefly at the University of California, Los Angeles. He died in Warsaw on July 28, 1998.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

McGinley enjoyed a wide readership in her lifetime, publishing her work in newspapers and women's magazines such as the Ladies Home Journal, as well as in literary periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Saturday Review and The Atlantic. She also held nearly a dozen honorary degrees – "including one from the stronghold of strictly masculine pride, Dartmouth College" (from the dust jacket of Sixpence in Her Shoe (copy 1964)). Time Magazine featured McGinley on its cover on June 18, 1965.

-bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem was too topical to pass up. Like so many of Oliver’s poems, it is an invitation to attend closely to life’s unexpected gifts. Happy reading.

On a pillar on the west wall of Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey is a white marble bust to poet and clergyman John Keble. The bust is signed and dated by Thomas Woolner, 1872 and is just inscribed 'JOHN KEBLE'. The memorial was originally much more elaborate and was in the south west tower chapel of the nave (now St George's chapel), placed between Dr Thomas Arnold and William Wordsworth. The bust, on a foliated corbel, was set within a decorated oval frame set with jewels with two small pillars either side of the bust. Above was a decorated cross and below a square tablet with the inscription:

In memory of John Keble, author of the Christian Year. Born 1792. Died 1866. In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. Isaiah xxx.15. He rests in peace at Hursley of which he was Vicar 30 years.

When the chapel was redesigned in 1932 the memorials there were all moved - Arnold to the north west nave chapel and Wordsworth to Poets' Corner. Only the bust of Keble was retained and mounted on a new Purbeck marble bracket in the Corner.

He was born at Fairford in Gloucestershire on 25th April 1792, son of the Reverend John Keble and his wife Sarah (Maule). After education at home he attended Oxford University. In 1827 he published his popular work The Christian Year. He was professor of poetry at Oxford and became rector of Hursley in Hampshire in 1836. With Newman and Pusey he instigated the Oxford Movement. He married Charlotte Clarke but there were no children. He died on 29th March 1866 and is buried at Hursley. Keble College in Oxford was founded in his memory.

-bio via Westminster Abbey

(Arthur) Yvor Winters was born in Chicago on October 17, 1900. While studying at the University of Chicago he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and decided to relocate to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the sake of his health. His early poems, published in 1921 and 1922, were all written at a tuberculosis sanitarium. He enrolled at the University of Colorado in 1925, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 1926, he married the poet and novelist Janet Lewis. He spent two years teaching at the University of Idaho in Moscow before entering Stanford University as a graduate student, receiving his PhD in 1934. From 1928 until his death, he was a member of Stanford’s English department.

Winters’s books of poetry include The Early Poems of Yvor Winters, 1920–1928(Swallow Press, 1966); Collected Poems (1952; revised edition, 1960), winner of the Bollingen Prize; Poems (Gyroscope Press, 1940); Before Disaster (Tryon Pamphlets, 1934); The Proof (Coward-McCann, Inc., 1930); and The Immobile Wind (M. Wheeler, 1921). In Defense of Reason (Swallow Press, 1947), Winters’s major critical work, is a collection of three earlier studies: The Anatomy of Nonsense (New Directions, 1943); Maule’s Curse (New Directions, 1938); and Primitivism and Decadence (Arrow Editions, 1937).

Winters was also a prolific and controversial critic who believed that a work of art should be “an act of moral judgement” and attacked such literary icons as T. S. Eliot and Henry James. The chair of the Stanford English department notoriously denounced Winters as a “disgrace to the department.”

Winters’s honors include a National Institute of Arts and Letters award as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He died on January 25, 1968, in Palo Alto, California.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Today’s poem is Davies’ lengthy meditation on what man can know and what he could stand to learn. Happy reading.

Poet and lawyer Sir John Davies was born in Wiltshire and educated at Winchester College and Queen’s College, Oxford, though historians disagree about whether he graduated. In 1588, he enrolled in the Middle Temple, where he studied with John Donne, and was called to the bar in 1595. In addition to his legal study, Davies wrote poetry, notably Orchestra, or, A Poeme of Dancing (1596). Davies’s other works include a series of epigrams drawn from his youthful misadventures; Nosce teipsum (1594), a poetic treatise on the immortality of the soul; and Hymnes of Astraea in Acrosticke Verse (1599),an acrostic poem spelling the words Elisabetha Regina. Davies also contributed poetic dialogues to Francis Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody(1602). His Collected Poems appeared in 1622. It is thought that Davies accompanied King James to Scotland after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603. Eventually knighted by the king, Davies was made solicitor general for Ireland and emerged as a champion of legal reform in Ireland. He attempted to lay the grounds for a strong civil society, albeit one that benefited England and English rule in all cases. Davies helped cement pro-English property laws and advocated the expulsion of Catholic priests to shore up Protestantism. He was appointed speaker in the Irish Parliament in 1613 and presided over the first Protestant majority. He returned to England and served in the Parliament of 1621. Charles I appointed Davies lord chief justice in 1626, but he died just before officially taking office. John Donne gave his funeral oration. Davies was buried in St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, satirist, and critic. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman’s, he won an English scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army’s Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir; and more. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

-bio via NYRB

A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile(1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.

Stallings’s poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”

Stallings's latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2023, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Also in today’s episode: a look at what’s new for The Daily Poem in 2025.

Happy reading!

Philip Appleman (1926-2020) served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and in the Merchant Marine after the war. He has degrees from Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Lyon, France.

His acclaimed books of poetry include Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie (W. W. Norton, 2009), New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996 (1996); Let There Be Light (1991); Darwin's Bestiary (1986); Open Doorways (1976); and Summer Love and Surf (1968). He is also the author of three novels, including Apes and Angels (Putnam, 1989); and six volumes of nonfiction, including the Norton Critical Edition, Darwin (1970).

Appleman has taught at Columbia University, SUNY Purchase, and is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has also served on the Governing Board of the Poetry Society of America and the Poets Advisory Board of Poets House. His many awards include a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and both the Castagnola Award and the Morley Award from the Poetry Society of America.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

In his youth, Robert Service worked in a shipping office and a bank, and briefly studied literature at the University of Glasgow. Inspired by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, Service sailed to western Canada in 1894 to become a cowboy in the Yukon Wilderness. He worked on a ranch and as a bank teller in Vancouver Island six years after the Gold Rush, gleaning material that would inform his poetry for years to come and earn him his reputation as “Bard of the Yukon.” Service traveled widely throughout his life—to Hollywood, Cuba, Alberta, Paris, Louisiana, and elsewhere—and his travels continued to fuel his writing.A prolific writer and poet, Service published numerous collections of poetry during his lifetime, including Songs of a Sourdough or Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses (1907), which went into ten printings its first year, Ballad of a Cheechako (1909) and Ballads of a Bohemian (1921), as well as two autobiographies and six novels. Several of his novels were made into films, and he also appeared as an actor in The Spoilers, a 1942 film with Marlene Dietrich.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to academic Calvinist parents, poet, author, and Native American rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson (born Helen Maria Fiske) was orphaned as a child and raised by her aunt. Jackson was sent to private schools and formed a lasting childhood friendship with Emily Dickinson. At the age of 21, Jackson married Lieutenant Edward Bissell Hunt and together they had two sons. Jackson began writing poetry only after the early deaths of her husband and both sons.

Jackson published five collections of poetry, including Verses (1870) and Easter Bells (1884), as well as children’s literature and travel books, often using the pseudonyms “H.H.,” “Rip van Winkle,” or “Saxe Holm.” Frequently in poor health, she moved to Colorado on her physician’s recommendation and married William Sharpless Jackson there in 1875.

Moved by an 1879 speech given by Chief Standing Bear, Jackson wrote A Century of Dishonor (1881), an exposé of the rampant crimes against Native Americans, which led to the founding of the Indian Rights Association. In 1884 she published Ramona, a fictionalized account of the plight of Southern California’s dispossessed Mission Indians, inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.Jackson was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 1985.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

…I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Today’s poem seemed an appropriate choice as we endure the death of one year and the pregnant anticipation of another. Happy reading!

Cecil Day Lewis tackles the leave-taking of Christmas and the emotional upheaval in can work in the hearts of kids from 1 to 92. Happy reading (and don’t take down that tree yet!)

Lewis, (born April 27, 1904, Ballintubbert, County Leix, Ire.—died May 22, 1972, Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, Eng.) was one of the leading British poets of the 1930s; he then turned from poetry of left-wing political statement to an individual lyricism expressed in more traditional forms.

The son of a clergyman, Day-Lewis was educated at the University of Oxford and taught school until 1935. His Transitional Poem (1929) had already attracted attention, and in the 1930s he was closely associated with W.H. Auden (whose style influenced his own) and other poets who sought a left-wing political solution to the ills of the day. Typical of his views at that time is the verse sequence The Magnetic Mountain (1933) and the critical study A Hope for Poetry(1934).

Day-Lewis was Clark lecturer at the University of Cambridge in 1946; his lectures there were published as The Poetic Image (1947). In 1952 he published his verse translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, which was commissioned by the BBC. He also translated Virgil’s Georgics (1940) and Eclogues (1963). He was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1951 to 1956. The Buried Day (1960), his autobiography, discusses his acceptance and later rejection of communism. Collected Poemsappeared in 1954. Later volumes of verse include The Room and Other Poems (1965) and The Whispering Roots (1970). The Complete Poems of C. Day-Lewis was published in 1992.

At his death he was poet laureate, having succeeded John Masefield in 1968. Under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake he also wrote detective novels, including Minute for Murder (1948) and Whisper in the Gloom (1954).

-bio via Britannica

Today’s poem is a selection from Auden’s superb long poem, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.

Poet and critic John Hollander wrote of Merrill that he “was continually reengaging those Proustian themes of the retrieval of lost childhood, the operations of involuntary memory and of an imaginative memory even more mysterious.”

Poet, editor, essayist, playwright, and lyricist Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She grew up in Michigan and Maryland, and earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge University. A former editor at the Atlantic Monthly, poetry editor at the New Republic, and co-editor of the fourth and fifth editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Salter’s thorough understanding of poetic tradition is clearly evident in her work. Salter is the author of many books of poetry, including A Kiss in Space (1999), Open Shutters (2003), A Phone Call to the Future (2008), Nothing by Design (2013), and The Surveyors (2017). Her second book, Unfinished Painting (1989) was a Lamont Selection for the most distinguished second volume of poetry published that year, Sunday Skaters (1994) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Open Shutters was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Salter has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and taught for many years at Mount Holyoke College. She is currently the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

The poem is collected in Waiting on the Word: a poem a day for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. You can also hear a vastly superior reading of the poem by the author himself.

Strand was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives(Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968).

Strand also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005); The Golden Ecco Anthology (Ecco, 1994); The Best American Poetry 1991; and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, co-edited with Charles Simic (HarperCollins, 1976).

Strand’s honors included the Bollingen Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Strand served as poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995 to 2000. He taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.

Mark Strand died at eighty years old on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northamptonshire, England. She married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University, at the age of sixteen. Two years later, Bradstreet, along with her husband and parents, immigrated to the American colonies with the Winthrop Puritan group, and the family settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There, Bradstreet and her husband raised eight children, and she became one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. It was during this time that Bradstreet penned many of the poems that would be taken to England by her brother-in-law, purportedly without her knowledge, and published in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America.

The Tenth Muse was the only collection of Bradstreet’s poetry to appear during her lifetime. In 1644, the family moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where Bradstreet lived until her death in 1672. In 1678, the first American edition of The Tenth Muse was published posthumously and expanded as Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning. Bradstreet’s most highly regarded work, a sequence of religious poems titled Contemplations, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

In 2009, Arnold traveled to Japan to research volcanoes for a planned book of poetry. In April of that year, he disappeared while hiking on the island of Kuchinoerabujima. In the New York Times, the poet David Orr mourned the loss of Arnold, but noted it would “be a mistake to think of him as a writer silenced before his prime... His shelf space may be smaller than one would wish, but he earned every bit of it.”

-bio via Copper Canyon Press and Poetry Foundation

Astonishments, a selection of her poetry in translation is available from Paraclete Press.

Jacqueline Woodson received a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She received the 2014 National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award, and a Sibert Honor. She wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Jacqueline grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from college with a B.A. in English. She is the author of dozens of award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

-bio via Penguin Random House

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) was the pseudonym of Frédéric Sauser, the Swiss son of a French Anabaptist father and a Scottish mother. As a young man he traveled widely, from St. Petersburg to New York and beyond, and these wanderings proved the inspiration of much of his later poetry and prose. Settled in Paris in 1912, Cendrars published two long poems, “Easter in New York” and “The Transsiberian,” which made him a major figure in the poetic avant-garde. At the outset of World War I, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, losing an arm in the battle of the Marnes. A prolific poet, Cendrars was also an exceptional novelist, the author of Moravagine, Gold, Rhum, and The Confessions of Dan Yack, among many other books.

-bio via New York Review of Books

Bill Holm was born in 1943 on a farm outside Minneota, Minnesota. He received a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College in 1965 and an MA from the University of Kansas in 1967. Holm was the author of several poetry collections, including Playing the Black Piano and The Dead Get By with Everything. His collection The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems was published posthumously in 2009. He also wrote several essay collections, including The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland. A professor emeritus at Southwest Minnesota State until his retirement in 2008, Holm was known for his connection to Minnesota. In an article for the Minn Post, Nick Hayes describes him as “the quintessential voice of our small towns and prairies.” He goes on to note that Holm “was also our lost Icelander in Minnesota.” The grandchild of Icelandic immigrants, Holm spent most of his summers at his cottage in Hofsos, Iceland, and his writing was influenced both by the heritage and landscape of both of his homes. In 2008, Holm received the McKnight Distinguished Artist Award. He died on February 26, 2009, in South Dakota.

-bio via Milkweed Editions

James Matthew Wilson is the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas.The author of fourteen books, his most recent collection of poems is Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds(Word on Fire, 2024). The Strangeness of the Good (2020), won the poetry book of the year award from the Catholic Media Awards. The Dallas Institute of Humanities awarded him the Hiett Prize in 2017; Memoria College gave him the Parnassus Prize, in 2022; and the Conference on Christianity and Literature twice gave him the Lionel Basney Award.In addition to his role at the University of Saint Thomas, he serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, scholar-in-residence of Aquinas College, editor of Colosseum Books, and poetry editor of Modern Age magazine.Wilson was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A.), the University of Massachusetts (M.A.), and the University of Notre Dame (M.F.A., Ph.D.), where he subsequently held a Sorin Research Fellowship. Wilson joined the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, in 2021, when he co-founded the Master of Fine Arts program.

-bio via Wilson’s website

Jessica Greenbaum is the author of Inventing Difficulty (Silverfish Review Press, 1998), winner of Gerald Cable Prize; The Two Yvonnes (Princeton University Press, 2012), named by Library Journal as a Best Book in Poetry; and Spilled and Gone (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Society of America. She teaches in New York City. 

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Espaillat’s numerous poetry collections include And After All (2019); Her Place in These Designs (2008); Playing at Stillness (2005); Rehearsing Absence (2001), recipient of the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; a bilingual chapbook titled Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word (2001); Where Horizons Go (1998), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Lapsing to Grace (1992).

On Rehearsing Absence, Robert B. Shaw wrote in Poetry, “To Rhina Espaillat the quotidian is no malady … it is the source of inspiration. Hers is a voice of experience, but it is neither jaded nor pedantic. She speaks not from some cramped corner but from somewhere close to the center of life.” Awarding Espaillat the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize for Where Horizons Go, X.J. Kennedy noted that “such developed skill and such mastery of rhyme and meter are certainly rare anymore; so is plainspeaking.”

Espaillat’s work has garnered many awards, including the Sparrow Sonnet Prize, three Poetry Society of America prizes, the Der-Hovanessian Translation Prize, and—for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost—the Robert Frost Foundation’s Tree at My Window Award. She is a two-time winner of The Formalist’s Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and the recipient of a 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College. She is a founding member of the Fresh Meadows Poets and a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets. For over a decade, she coordinated the Newburyport Art Association’s Annual Poetry Contest.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is a selection from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s American epic, The Song of Hiawatha. The passage is structured beautifully so that two divergent streams of imaginative thought suddenly flow together into a single, tangible reality. Happy reading.

-bio via Wikipedia

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Robert Morgan (born 1944) is an American poet, short story writer, non-fiction author, biographer, and novelist. He studied at North Carolina State University as an engineering and mathematics major, transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an English major, graduating in 1965, and completed an MFA degree at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 1968. He has taught at Cornell University since 1971, and was appointed Professor of English in 1984.

—Bia via Wikipedia

Shaw has lectured in North America and abroad on topics such as art and spirituality, the Christian imagination, poetry-writing, and journal-writing as an aid to artistic and spiritual growth.

A charter member of the Chrysostom Society of Writers, Shaw is author of fourteen volumes of poetry including Angels Everywhere, The Generosity, Eye of the Beholder, Sea Glass: New & Selected Poems (WordFarm, 2016), Thumbprint in the Clay: Divine Marks of Beauty, Order and Grace (InterVarsity Press, 2016), Polishing the Petoskey Stone (Shaw, 1990), Writing the River (Pinon Press, 1994/Regent Publishing, 1997), The Angles of Light (Waterbrook, 2000), The Green Earth: Poems of Creation (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), has edited three poetry anthologies and a festschrift, The Swiftly Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L’Engle, (Shaw, 1998). Her most recent books are What the Light Was Like (Word Farm), Accompanied by Angels (Eerdmans), The Genesis of It All (Paraclete), and Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination & Spirit (Nelson). Her poetic work and essays have been widely anthologized. Shaw has authored several non-fiction prose books, including Water My Soul: Cultivating the Interior Life (Zondervan) and The Crime of Living Cautiously(InterVarsity). She has also co-authored three books with Madeleine L’Engle, WinterSong (Regent), Friends for the Journey (Regent), and A Prayer Book for Spiritual Friends (Augsburg/Fortress).

Shaw is poetry editor and a contributing editor of Radix, as quarterly journal published in Berkeley, CA, that celebrates art, literature, music, psychology, science and the media, featuring original poetry, reviews and interviews. She is also poetry and fiction editor of Crux, an academic journal published quarterly by Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

-bio via LuciShaw.com

Anglo-Irish poet, satirist, essayist, and political pamphleteer Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He spent much of his early adult life in England before returning to Dublin to serve as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin for the last 30 years of his life. It was this later stage when he would write most of his greatest works. Best known as the author of A Modest Proposal (1729), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Tale Of A Tub (1704), Swift is widely acknowledged as the greatest prose satirist in the history of English literature.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Nesbitt’s poetry for children is “irrepressible, unpredictable, and raucously popular,” in the words of former Children’s Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis. Nesbitt’s poems frequently deal with humorous, relatable situations that verge on the madcap. He is the author of numerous books of poetry for children, including Believe It or Not, My Brother Has a Monster (2015), The Biggest Burp Ever (2014), Kiss, Kiss Good Night  (2013), The Armpit of Doom: Funny Poems for Kids (2012), The Ultimate Top Secret Guide to Taking Over the World (2011), The Tighty-Whitey Spider (2010), Revenge of the Lunch Ladies (2007), Santa Got Stuck in the Chimney (2006), When the Teacher Isn’t Looking: And Other Funny School Poems (2005), and The Aliens Have Landed at Our School! (2001), among many others. In addition to writing books, Nesbitt has also written lyrics for the group Eric Herman and the Invisible Band. His lyrics are included on the CDs What a Ride (2007), Snail’s Pace (2007), Snow Day (2006), Monkey Business (2005), and The Kid in the Mirror (2003).Nesbitt’s poems have appeared in hundreds of anthologies, magazines, and textbooks worldwide, and were included on the television show “Jack Hanna’s Wildlife Adventures” and in the film “Life As We Know It.” Nesbitt is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. His website, Poetry4kids, is an online “Funny Poetry Playground” that features poems, lessons, games, and poetry-related activities. In 2013, Nesbitt was named the Children’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. He currently lives in Spokane, Washington with his wife, children, and pets.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

-bio via Poetry Foundation

After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his book, The Flying Change: Poems, poet Henry Taylor remarked to Joseph McLellan of the Washington Post: “The Pulitzer has a funny way of changing people’s opinions about it. If you haven’t won one, you go around saying things like ‘Well, it’s all political’ or ‘It’s a lottery’ and stuff like that. I would like to go on record as saying that although I’m deeply grateful and feel very honored, I still believe that it’s a lottery and that nobody deserves it.” Despite his disbelief that he could earn such a prestigious award, the Pulitzer is not the only major prize Taylor has won. His other honors include the Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Golden Crane Award of the Washington Chapter of the American Literary Translators Association.

Taylor also has a sense for the comic. Indeed, the poet has remarked that he was first recognized as the author of several verse parodies, which he submitted to the magazine Sixties. “I was mildly nettled to find that they were better known, at least among poets, than anything else I had done,” Taylor reflects in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. These parodies, along with other poems, appear in the author’s first poetry collection, The Horse Show at Midnight (1966). This book also contains poems concerned with the unavoidable changes people must go through in life, a theme that dominates many of Taylor’s verses. Dillard explains, “Henry Taylor has for all his poetic career been drawn inexorably to questions of time and mutability, of inevitable and painful change in even the most fixed and stable of circumstances.” The conflict between a desire for life to remain constant and predictable and the realization of the necessity for change in the form of aging, personal growth, and death creates a tension in Taylor’s poems that is also present in his other collections, including An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards. Dillard calls this third collection, which contains all the poems previously published in Breakings, Taylor’s “best work” up to that time, “clearly marking growth and progress to match his own changes in the years since The Horse Show at Midnight.”

A lover of horses since his childhood in rural Virginia, Taylor uses an equestrian term for the title of his fifth book of poems, The Flying Change (1985). The name refers to the mid-air change of leg, or lead, a horse may sometimes make while cantering. Several of the poems contained in the collection describe similarly unexpected changes that occur in the course of otherwise predictable lives spent in relaxed, countryside settings. “Thus in the best poems here,” comments New York Times Book Review contributor Peter Stitt, “we find something altogether different from the joys of preppy picnicking. Mr. Taylor seeks for his poetry [a] kind of unsettling change, [a] sort of rent in the veil of ordinary life.” Some examples of this in The Flying Change are the poems “Landscape with Tractor,” in which the narrator discovers a corpse in a field, and “At the Swings,” in which the poet reflects on his cancer-stricken mother-in-law, while pushing his sons on a swing set. Other poems in the book explore the effects of such incidents as a small herd of deer suddenly interrupting the peace of a lazy day in which the narrator has been reflecting on his old age, or the surprise of seeing a horse rip its neck on a barbed wire fence.

A number of critics, like Washington Times reviewer Reed Whittemore, laud Taylor’s calm thoughtfulness in these and other poems, comparing it to the tone of other current poets. “Much contemporary verse is now so flighty,” says Whittemore, “so persistently thoughtless, that in contrast the steadiness of [The Flying Change], its persistence in exploring the mental dimensions of a worthwhile moment, is particularly striking, a calmness in the unsettled poetic weather.” Other critics, like Poetry contributor David Shapiro, also compliment the writer on his sensitivity to the atmosphere of the countryside. “Taylor is a poet of white clapboard houses that have existed ‘longer / than anyone now alive,’” observes Shapiro, who quotes the poet. “That is why Taylor can be such a satisfactory poet,” the reviewer concludes.

Though he has written award-winning verses, Taylor remains under the radar. According to Garrett and others, this is due to Taylor’s nonconformist approach. The critic continues: “In forms and content, style and substance, he is not so much out of fashion as deliberately, determinedly unfashionable. His love of form is (for the present) unfashionable. His sense of humor, which does not spare himself, is unfashionable. His preference for country life, in the face of the fact that the best known of his contemporaries are bunched up in several urban areas, cannot have made them, the others, feel easy about him, or themselves for that matter. They have every good reason to try to ignore him.” Whittemore compares Taylor’s technically well-ordered style and leisurely reflections of life to the poetry of Robert Frost and Howard Nemerov. “Among 20th-century poets,” Whittemore concludes, “Mr. Taylor is ... trying to carry on with this old and honorable, but now unfavored, mission of the art. He enjoys such reflections, reaching (but modestly) for what, remember, we even used to call wisdom.”

Taylor lives and works in Leesburg, Virginia.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

On February 9, 1874, Amy Lowell was born at Sevenels, a ten-acre family estate in Brookline, Massachusetts. Her family was Episcopalian, of old New England stock, and at the top of Boston society. Lowell was the youngest of five children. Her elder brother Abbott Lawrence, a freshman at Harvard at the time of her birth, went on to become president of Harvard College. As a young girl she was first tutored at home, then attended private schools in Boston, during which time she made several trips to Europe with her family. At seventeen, she secluded herself in the 7,000-book library at Sevenels to study literature. Lowell was encouraged to write from an early age.

In 1887 Lowell, with her mother and sister, wrote Dream Drops or Stories From Fairy Land by a Dreamer, printed privately by the Boston firm Cupples and Hurd. Her poem “Fixed Idea” was published in 1910 by the Atlantic Monthly, after which Lowell published individual poems in various journals. In October of 1912, Houghton Mifflin published her first collection, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass.

Lowell, a vivacious and outspoken businesswoman, tended to excite controversy. She was deeply interested in and influenced by the Imagist movement, led by Ezra Pound. The primary Imagists were Pound, Richard Aldington, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Ford Madox Ford. This Anglo-American movement believed, in Lowell’s words, that “concentration is of the very essence of poetry” and strove to “produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.” Lowell campaigned for the success of Imagist poetry in America and embraced its principles in her own work. She acted as a publicity agent for the movement, editing and contributing to an anthology of Imagist poets in 1915.

Lowell’s enthusiastic involvement and influence contributed to Pound’s separation from the movement. As Lowell continued to explore the Imagist style she pioneered the use of “polyphonic prose” in English, mixing formal verse and free forms. Later she was drawn to and influenced by Chinese and Japanese poetry. This interest led her to collaborate with translator Florence Ayscough on Fir-Flower Tablets in 1921. Lowell had a lifelong love for the poet John Keats, whose letters she collected and whose influence can be seen in her poems. She believed him to be the forbearer of Imagism. Her biography of Keats was published in 1925, the same year she won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection What’s O’Clock (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925).

A dedicated poet, publicity agent, collector, critic, and lecturer, Amy Lowell died on May 12, 1925, at Sevenels.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Ernest Lawrence Thayer was born on August 14, 1863, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He graduated with a BA in philosophy from Harvard University in 1885, where he was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club and edited the Harvard Lampoon. 

At Harvard, Thayer met William Randolph Hearst, who would later run the San Francisco Examiner and hire Thayer to write a humorous column for the newspaper. On June 3, 1883, Thayer published what would become his most famous work, the poem "Casey at the Bat," under the pen name Phin. The poem gained popularity after the performer William DeWolf Hopper incorporated a recitation of it into his theatrical and radio performances.

Thayer moved to Santa Barbara, California, in 1912. He died in Santa Barbara on August 21, 1940.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Today’s poem celebrates the crisp, cool days of early Autumn as the most hospitable season of the year. Happy reading.

The world-wandering John Masefield waxes Solomonic in today’s poem. Happy reading.

Hall, taken aback by the success of this poem, expressed some regret that he became “the fellow whose son strapped him into the electric chair,” explaining that its inspiration came from 2 a.m. bottle-feedings that he conducted “with pleasure.” Happy reading.

David Thompson Watson McCord was born on December 15, 1897, in New York. A poet and fundraiser, McCord grew up in Portland, Oregon. He received both a BA and MA from Harvard University and briefly served in the military at the end of World War I. In 1922, McCord became associate editor for the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, where he served as editor from 1940 to 1946. He was also executive director of the Harvard College Fund for thirty-eight years.  

McCord, who has been widely recognized for his children's poetry, wrote and edited over fifty works of poetry and prose. He was the recipient of Harvard University's first honorary doctorate of humane letters, the first NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant. He died on April 13, 1997, in Boston, Massachusetts. 

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Walter Savage Landor (30 January 1775 – 17 September 1864) was an English writer, poet, and activist. His best known works were the prose Imaginary Conversations, and the poem "Rose Aylmer," but the critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity. As remarkable as his work was, it was equalled by his rumbustious character and lively temperament. Both his writing and political activism, such as his support for Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi, were imbued with his passion for liberal and republican causes. He befriended and influenced the next generation of literary reformers such as Charles Dickens and Robert Browning.

-bio via Wikipedia

-bio via Wikipedia

Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.

Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Some of her works have been set to music.

-bio via Wikipedia

Louis Untermeyer was the author, editor or compiler, and translator of more than 100 books for readers of all ages. He will be best remembered as the prolific anthologist whose collections have introduced students to contemporary American poetry since 1919. The son of an established New York jeweler, Untermeyer’s interest in poetry led to friendships with poets from three generations, including many of the century’s major writers. His tastes were eclectic. In the Washington Post, Martin Weil related that Untermeyer once “described himself as ‘a bone collector’ with ‘the mind of a magpie.’” He was a liberal who did much to allay the Victorian myth that poetry is a highbrow art. “What most of us don’t realize is that everyone loves poetry,” he was quoted by Weil as saying, pointing out the rhymes on the once-ubiquitous Burma Shave road signs as an example.Untermeyer developed his taste for literature while a child. His mother had read aloud to him from a variety of sources, including the epic poems “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Hiawatha.” Bedtime stories he told to his brother Martin combined elements from every story he could remember, he revealed in Bygones: The Recollections of Louis Untermeyer. When he learned to read for himself, he was particularly impressed by books such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Dante’s Inferno. Gustave Dore’s illustrations in these books captivated him and encouraged his imagination toward fantasy. Almost 50 years later, Untermeyer published several volumes of retold French fairy tales, all illustrated by the famous French artist.In addition to children’s books and anthologies, Untermeyer published collections of his own poetry. He began to compose light verse and parodies during his teen years after dropping out of school to join his father’s business. With financial help from his father, he published First Love in 1911. Sentiments of social protest expressed in the 1914 volume Challenge received disapproval from anti-communist groups 40 years later; as a result of suspicion, Untermeyer lost his seat on the “What’s My Line” game show panel to publisher Bennett Cerf. During the 1970s, he found himself “instinctively, if incongruously, allied with the protesting young,” he wrote in the New York Times. In the same article he encouraged the spirit of experiment that characterized the decade, saying, “it is the non-conformers, the innovators in art, science, technology, and human relations who, misunderstood and ridiculed in their own times, have shaped our world.” Untermeyer, who did not promote any particular ideology, remained a popular speaker and lecturer, sharing criticism of poetry and anecdotes about famous poets with audiences in the United States and as far away as India and Japan.Untermeyer resigned from the jewelry business in 1923 in order to give all his attention to literary pursuits. Friendships with Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Arthur Miller, and other literary figures provided him with material for books. For example, The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer contains letters selected from almost 50 years of correspondence with the New England poet. The anthologist’s autobiographies From Another World and Bygones relate as much about other writers as they do about his personal life. Bygones provides his reflections on the four women who were his wives. Jean Starr moved to Vienna with Untermeyer after he became a full-time writer; Virginia Moore was his wife for about a year; Esther Antin, a lawyer he met in Toledo, Ohio, married him in 1933; 15 years later, he married Bryna Ivens, with whom he edited a dozen books for children.In his later years, Untermeyer, like Frost, had a deep appreciation for country life. He once told Contemporary Authors: “I live on an abandoned farm in Connecticut … ever since I found my native New York unlivable as well as unlovable. … On these green and sometimes arctic acres I cultivate whatever flowers insist on growing in spite of my neglect; delight in the accumulation of chickadees, juncos, cardinals, and the widest possible variety of songless sparrows; grow old along with three pampered cats and one spoiled cairn terrier; season my love of home with the spice of annual travel, chiefly to such musical centers as Vienna, Salzburg, Milan, and London; and am always happy to be home again.” Untermeyer died in 1977.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold, born in Laleham, Middlesex, on December 24, 1822, began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics.

After marrying in 1851, Arnold began work as a government school inspector, a grueling position which nonetheless afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout England and the Continent. Throughout his thirty-five years in this position Arnold developed an interest in education, an interest which fed into both his critical works and his poetry. Empedocles on Etna (1852) and Poems (1853) established Arnold’s reputation as a poet and, in 1857, he was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. During this time Arnold wrote the bulk of his most famous critical works, Essays in Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he sets forth ideas that greatly reflect the predominant values of the Victorian era.

Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold’s poetry often wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. In “To Marguerite—Continued,” for example, Arnold revises John Donne’s assertion that “No man is an island,” suggesting that we “mortals” are indeed “in the sea of life enisled.” Other well-known poems, such as “Dover Beach,” link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity. His most influential essays, however, were those on literary topics. In “The Function of Criticism” (1865) and “The Study of Poetry” (1880) Arnold called for a new epic poetry: a poetry that would address the moral needs of his readers, “to animate and ennoble them.” Arnold’s arguments, for a renewed religious faith and an adoption of classical aesthetics and morals, are particularly representative of mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. His approach—his gentlemanly and subtle style—to these issues, however, established criticism as an art form, and has influenced almost every major English critic since, including T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom. Though perhaps less obvious, the tremendous influence of his poetry, which addresses the poet’s most innermost feelings with complete transparency, can easily be seen in writers as different from each other as W. B. Yeats, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Sharon Olds. Late in life, in 1883 and 1886, Arnold made two lecturing tours of the United States.

Matthew Arnold died in Liverpool on April 15, 1888.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

The poverty and human suffering Wright witnessed as a child profoundly influenced his writing and he used his poetry as a mode to discuss his political and social concerns. He modeled his work after that of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, whose engagement with profound human issues and emotions he admired. The subjects of Wright’s earlier books, The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1957), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press, 1959), include men and women who have lost love or have been marginalized from society and they invite the reader to step in and experience the pain of their isolation. Wright possessed the ability to reinvent his writing style at will, moving easily from stage to stage. His earlier work adheres to conventional systems of meter and stanza, while his later work exhibits more open, looser forms, as with The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963).

Wright was elected a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1971, and, the following year, his Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press) received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Wright died in New York City on March 25, 1980.

Wendy Cope was raised in Kent, England, where her parents often recited poetry to her. She earned a BA in history and trained as a teacher at Oxford University. Cope taught in primary schools for many years before publishing her first book of poetry, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986). The collection was an incredible success, selling tens of thousands of copies in the UK. It also announced Cope’s remarkable talents for parody, word play, dexterity with received forms, and the use of humor to address grave topics. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, critic and poet A.M. Juster declared, “one has to go back to Byron to find a poet as consistently witty, wide-ranging, and technically outstanding as Cope.”

Cope’s poetry collections include Serious Concerns (1992); If I Don’t Know (2001), shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979–2006 (2008); Family Values (2011); Christmas Poems (2017), a collection of new and previously published Christmas-themed work; and Anecdotal Evidence (2018). She is the author of the prose collection Life, Love and the Archers (2015) and two books for children, Twiddling Your Thumbs (1988) and The River Girl (1991), and the editor of numerous anthologies, including, The Faber Book of Bedtime Stories (1999).

Cope has received a Cholmondeley Award and a Michael Braude Award for Light Verse from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Winchester, England.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Wilbur’s first book of poems, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (Reynal & Hitchcock) was published in 1947. Since then, he has published several books of poems, including Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); Collected Poems, 1943–2004 (Harvest Books, 2004); Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000); New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Mind-Reader: New Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969); Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961); Things of This World (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Ceremony and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950).

Wilbur also published numerous translations of French plays—specifically those of the seventeenth century French dramatists Molière and Jean Racine—as well as poetry by Paul Valéry, François Villon, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, and others. Wilbur is also the author of several books for children and a few collections of prose pieces, and has edited such books as Poems of Shakespeare (Penguin Books, 1966) and The Complete Poems of Poe (Dell Publishing Company, 1959).

About Wilbur’s poems, one reviewer for the Washington Post said, “Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”

Among Wilbur’s honors are the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Bollingen Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and is a former poet laureate of the United States.

Wilbur served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1961 to 1995. He died on October 15, 2017 in Belmont, Massachusetts.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Cullen kept his finger on the pulse of Harlem during the 1920s while he attended New York University and then a graduate program at Harvard. His poetry became popular during his student years, especially his prize-winning poem “The Ballad of a Brown Girl.” In 1925, he published his first volume of poetry entitled Color. Within the next few years, Cullen became well-known, publishing several books and winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 (to write poetry in France).

At first, Cullen was critical of Langston Hughes’ poetry, writing that, in using jazz rhythms in his poetry, Hughes was erecting barriers between race instead of removing them. In his own poetry, Cullen sought to erase these boundaries and took traditionalist poets, such as Keats and A.E. Housman, as models for his own poetry. However, despite his criticisms of other black poets, the majority of Cullen’s own verses confront racial issues.

By the 1930s, Cullen’s influence had waned, though he continued to publish prolifically, including novels, a collection of poems for children, the autobiography of his cat, and an adaption of his novel God Sends Sunday into a Broadway musical.

-bio via Song of America

Kipling's works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), Kim (1901), the Just So Stories (1902) and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), and "If—" (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".

Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers. Henry James said "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.

-bio via Wikipedia

Toward the end of her public career, Nelson focused on journalism and public speaking. She gave numerous speeches as the executive secretary of the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee from 1928 to 1931. From 1926 to 1930, Nelson wrote newspaper columns and became an activist for women’s suffrage and civil rights. In 1922, she advocated for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, and helped establish the Industrial School for Colored Girls in Delaware. One of her speeches was published and included in Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (The Bookery Publishing Company, 1914), and examples of her dialect poetry, dramatic prose, and oratory were collected The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (J. L. Nichols & Co., 1920). Both are anthologies that Nelson edited. 

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Hughes’s poetry signaled a dramatic departure from the prevailing modes of the period. The stereotypical poem of the time was determined not to risk too much: politely domestic in its subject matter, understated and mildly ironic in style. By contrast, Hughes marshaled a language of nearly Shakespearean resonance to explore themes which were mythic and elemental.

Hughes remained a controversial figure after Plath’s suicide left him as her literary executor and he refused (citing family privacy) to publish many of her papers. Nevertheless, his long career included unprecedented best-selling volumes such as Lupercal (Faber & Faber, 1960), Crow (Faber & Faber, 1970), Selected Poems 1957–1981 (Faber & Faber, 1982), and Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber, 1998), as well as many beloved children’s books, including The Iron Man (Faber & Faber, 1968), which was adapted as The Iron Giant (1999). With Seamus Heaney, he edited the popular anthologies The Rattle Bag (Faber & Faber, 1982) and The School Bag (Faber & Faber, 1997). Hughes was named executor of Plath’s literary estate and he edited several volumes of her work. Hughes also translated works from classical authors, including Ovid and Aeschylus. Hughes was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate in 1984, a post he held until his death in 1998. Among his many awards, he was appointed to the Order of Merit, one of Britain’s highest honors.

Hughes married Carol Orchard in 1970, and the couple lived on a small farm in Devon until his death. His forays into translations, essays, and criticism were noted for their intelligence and range. Hughes continued writing and publishing poems until his death from cancer on October 28, 1998. A memorial to Hughes in the famed Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey was unveiled in 2011.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Strand was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives (Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968).

Strand also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005); The Golden Ecco Anthology (Ecco, 1994); The Best American Poetry 1991; and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, co-edited with Charles Simic (HarperCollins, 1976).

Strand’s honors included the Bollingen Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Strand served as poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995 to 2000. He taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.

Mark Strand died at eighty years old on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913, Robert Hayden was raised in the Detroit neighborhood Paradise Valley. He had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and lived, at times, with his parents and with a foster family. In 1932, he graduated from high school and, with the help of a scholarship, attended Detroit City College (later, Wayne State University). In 1944, Hayden received his graduate degree from the University of Michigan.

Hayden published his first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust (Falcon Press), in 1940, at the age of twenty-seven. He enrolled in a graduate English literature program at the University of Michigan, where he studied with W. H. Auden. Auden became an influential and critical guide in the development of Hayden’s writing. Hayden admired the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wiley, Carl Sandburg, and Hart Crane, as well as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. He had an interest in African American history and explored his concerns about race in his writing. Hayden ultimately authored nine collections of poetry during his lifetime, as well as a collection of essays, and some children’s literature. Hayden’s poetry gained international recognition in the 1960s, and he was awarded the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 for his book Ballad of Remembrance (Paul Breman, 1962).

Explaining the trajectory of Hayden’s career, the poet William Meredith wrote:

Hayden declared himself, at considerable cost in popularity, an American poet rather than a Black poet, when for a time there was posited an unreconcilable difference between the two roles. There is scarcely a line of his which is not identifiable as an experience of Black America, but he would not relinquish the title of American writer for any narrower identity.

After receiving his graduate degree from the University of Michigan, Hayden remained there for two years as a teaching fellow. He was the first Black member of the English department. He then joined the faculty at Fisk University in Nashville, where he would remain for more than twenty years. In 1975, Hayden received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and, in 1976, he became the first Black American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later, U.S. poet laureate).

Hayden died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 25, 1980.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, sometimes a portrait of your last wife who died under suspicious circumstances is as good as a confession. Happy(?) reading!

Children’s poet and educator Constance Levy earned degrees at Washington University and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Known for its careful attention to external and internal rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and assonance, Levy’s work frequently takes encounters with the natural world as its subject. By drawing on her own childhood encounters, Levy re-experiences the world through verse in the fresh and exuberant ways that children perceive natural objects and phenomena, often for the first time. Reviewers have consistently praised Levy’s poems for their accessible yet creative language. Her books include The Story of Red Rubber Ball (2004), Splash!: Poems of Our Watery World (2002), A Crack in the Clouds and Other Poems (1998), A Tree Place and Other Poems (1994), and I’m Going to Pet a Worm Today and Other Poems (1991). School Library Journal’s Kathleen Whalin summed up the appeal of Levy’s verse best in her review of When Whales Exhale and Other Poems: “To read Levy is to see the wonder of the everyday world.”

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Edward Lear (12 May 1812 – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.

His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals, making coloured drawings during his journeys (which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books) and as a minor illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems.

As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.

-bio via Wikipedia

Raised in Istanbul, Hikmet left Allied-occupied Turkey after the First World War and ended up in Moscow, where he attended university and met writers and artists from all over the world. After the Turkish Independence in 1924, he returned to Turkey but was soon arrested for working on a leftist magazine. He managed to escape to Russia, where he continued to write plays and poems.

In 1928, a general amnesty allowed Hikmet to return to Turkey, and during the next ten years he published nine books of poetry—five collections and four long poems—while working as a proofreader, journalist, scriptwriter, and translator. He left Turkey for the last time in 1951, after serving a lengthy jail sentence for his radical acts, and lived in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where he continued to work for the ideals of world Communism. After receiving early recognition for his patriotic poems in syllabic meter, Hikmet came under the influence of the Russian Futurists in Moscow, and abandoned traditional forms while attempting to “depoetize” poetry.

Many of Hikmet’s works have been translated into English, including Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse (Persea Books, 2009); Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (Persea Books, 1975); The Day Before Tomorrow (Carcanet Press, 1972); The Moscow Symphony (Rapp & Whiting, 1970); and Selected Poems (Cape Editions, 1967). In 1936, he published Seyh Bedreddin destani [The Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin] and Memleketimden insan manzaralari [Portraits of People from My Land].

Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1963. The first modern Turkish poet, he is recognized around the world as one of the great international poets of the twentieth century.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

-bio via Library of Congress

-bio via Poetry Foundation

"His wit…was too original at first to go down with the very delectable highly respectable magazine editors of the Nineties. It was odd, unexpected, his own brand. It takes genius to write the best nonsense, which is often far more sensible than sense. Herford's, the result of care and polish, looked unforced.…Intelligent, thoughtful, well-bred, what with his animals and his children and his artistic simplicities, he was remote from the style of the best moderns. No violence, no obscenity, not even obscurity or that long-windedness which is the signet of the illustrious writer of today. An old-fashioned gentleman, a painstaking artist, whose work had edge, grace and distinction."

Brown was born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, the middle child of three children of Maude Margaret and Robert Bruce Brown. She was the granddaughter of politician Benjamin Gratz Brown. Her parents had an unhappy marriage. She was initially raised in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, and later attended Chateau Brilliantmont boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923, while her parents were living in India and Canterbury, Connecticut.

In 1925, Brown attended The Kew-Forest School. She began attending Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics. After graduation in 1928, Brown went on to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.

Brown was an avid, lifelong beagler and was noted for her ability to keep pace, on foot, with the hounds.

Following her graduation with a B.A. in English from Hollins in 1932, Brown worked as a teacher and also studied art. While working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City she started writing books for children. Bank Street promoted a new approach to children's education and literature, emphasizing the real world and the "here and now". This philosophy influenced Brown's work; she was also inspired by the poet Gertrude Stein, whose literary style influenced Brown's own writing.

Brown's first published children's book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers. Impressed by Brown's "here and now" style, W. R. Scott hired her as his first editor in 1938. Through Scott, she published the Noisy Book series among others. As editor at Scott, one of Brown's first projects was to recruit contemporary authors to write children's books for the company. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck neglected to respond, but Brown's hero, Gertrude Stein, accepted the offer. Stein's book The World is Round was illustrated by Clement Hurd, who had previously teamed with Brown on W. R. Scott's Bumble Bugs and Elephants, considered "perhaps the first modern board book for babies". Brown and Hurd later teamed on the children's book classics The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon, published by Harper. In addition to publishing a number of Brown's books, under her editorship, W. R. Scott published Edith Thacher Hurd's first book, Hurry Hurry, and Esphyr Slobodkina's classic Caps for Sale.

-bio via Wikipedia

1832 conclusion:

They cross'd themselves, their stars they blest,

Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest.

There lay a parchment on her breast,

That puzzled more than all the rest,

       The wellfed wits at Camelot.

'The web was woven curiously,

The charm is broken utterly,

Draw near and fear not,—this is I,

       The Lady of Shalott.'

1842 conclusion:Who is this? and what is here?

And in the lighted palace near

Died the sound of royal cheer;

And they cross'd themselves for fear,

       All the knights at Camelot:

But Lancelot mused a little space;

He said, "She has a lovely face;

God in his mercy lend her grace,

       The Lady of Shalott."

John Hollander, one of contemporary poetry’s foremost poets, editors, and anthologists, grew up in New York City. He studied at Columbia University and Indiana University, and he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. Hollander received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Levinson Prize, a MacArthur Foundation grant, and the poet laureateship of Connecticut. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he taught at Hunter College, Connecticut College, and Yale University, where he was the Sterling Professor emeritus of English.

Over the course of an astonishing career, Hollander influenced generations of poets and thinkers with his critical work, his anthologies and his poetry. In the words of J.D. McClatchy, Hollander was “a formidable presence in American literary life.” Hollander’s eminence as a scholar and critic was in some ways greater than his reputation as a poet. His groundbreaking introduction to form and prosody Rhyme’s Reason (1981), as well as his work as an anthologist, has ensured him a place as one of the 20th-century’s great, original literary critics. Hollander’s critical writing is known for its extreme erudition and graceful touch. Hollander’s poetry possesses many of the same qualities, though the wide range of allusion and technical virtuosity can make it seem “difficult” to a general readership.

Hollander’s first poetry collection, A Crackling of Thorns (1958) won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Awards, judged by W.H. Auden. And in fact James K. Robinson in the Southern Review found that Hollander’s “early poetry resembles Auden’s in its wit, its learned allusiveness, its prosodic mastery.” Hollander’s technique continued to develop through later books like Visions from the Ramble (1965) and The Night Mirror (1971). Broader in range and scope than his previous work, Hollander’s Tales Told of the Fathers (1975) and Spectral Emanations (1978) heralded his arrival as a major force in contemporary poetry. Reviewing Spectral Emanations for the New Republic, Harold Bloom reflected on his changing impressions of the poet’s work over the first 20 years of his career: “I read [A Crackling of Thorns] … soon after I first met the poet, and was rather more impressed by the man than by the book. It has taken 20 years for the emotional complexity, spiritual anguish, and intellectual and moral power of the man to become the book. The enormous mastery of verse was there from the start, and is there still … But there seemed almost always to be more knowledge and insight within Hollander than the verse could accommodate.” Bloom found in Spectral Emanations “another poet as vital and accomplished as [A.R.] Ammons, [James] Merrill, [W.S.] Merwin, [John] Ashbery, James Wright, an immense augmentation to what is clearly a group of major poets.”

Shortly after Spectral Emanations, Hollander published Blue Wine and Other Poems (1979), a volume which a number of critics have identified as an important milestone in Hollander’s life and career. Reviewing the work for the New Leader, Phoebe Pettingell remarked, “I would guess from the evidence of Blue Wine that John Hollander is now at the crossroads of his own midlife journey, picking out a new direction to follow.” Hollander’s new direction proved to be incredibly fruitful: his next books were unqualified successes. Powers of Thirteen (1983) won the Bollingen Prize from Yale University and In Time and Place (1986) was highly praised for its blend of verse and prose. In the Times Literary Supplement, Jay Parini believed “an elegiac tone dominates this book, which begins with a sequence of 34 poems in the In Memoriam stanza. These interconnecting lyrics are exquisite and moving, superior to almost anything else Hollander has ever written.” Parini described the book as “a landmark in contemporary poetry.” McClatchy held up In Time and Place as evidence that Hollander is “part conjurer and part philosopher, one of our language’s true mythographers and one of its very best poets.”

Hollander continued to publish challenging, technically stunning verse throughout the 1980s and ’90s. His Selected Poetry (1993) was released simultaneously with Tesserae (1993); Figurehead and Other Poems (1999) came a few years later. “The work collected in [Tesserae and Other Poems and Selected Poetry] makes clear that John Hollander is a considerable poet,” New Republic reviewer Vernon Shetley remarked, “but it may leave readers wondering still, thirty-five years after his first book … exactly what kind of poet Hollander is.” Shetley recognized the sheer variety of Hollander’s work, but also noted the peculiar absence of anything like a personality, “as if the poet had taken to heart, much more fully than its author, Eliot’s dictum that poetry should embody ‘emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.’” Another frequent charge leveled against Hollander’s work is that it is “philosophical verse.” Reviewing A Draft of Light (2008) for Jacket Magazine, Alex Lewis argued that instead of writing “philosophizing verse,” Hollander actually “borrows from philosophy a language and a way of thought. Hollander’s poems are frequently meta-poems that create further meaning out of their own self-interrogations, out of their own reflexivity.” As always, the poems are underpinned by an enormous amount of learning and incredible technical expertise and require “a good deal of time and thought to unravel,” Lewis admitted. But the rewards are great: “the book deepens every time that I read it,” Lewis wrote, adding that Hollander’s later years have given his work grandeur akin to Thomas Hardy and Wallace Stevens.

Hollander’s work as a critic and anthologist has been widely praised from the start. As editor, he has worked on volumes of poets as diverse as Ben Jonson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; his anthologist’s credentials are impeccable. He was widely praised for the expansive American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (1994), two volumes of verse including ballads, sonnets, epic poetry, and even folk songs. Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times praised the range of poets and authors included in the anthology: “Mr. Hollander has a large vision at work in these highly original volumes of verse. Without passing critical judgment, he allows the reader to savor not only the geniuses but also the second-rank writers of the era.” Hollander also worked on the companion volume, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (2000) with fellow poets and scholars Robert Hass, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff.

Hollander’s prose and criticism has been read and absorbed by generations of readers and writers. Perhaps his most lasting work is Rhyme’s Reason. In an interview with Paul Devlin of St. John’s University, Hollander described the impetus behind the volume: “Thinking of my own students, and of how there was no such guide to the varieties of verse in English to which I could send them and that would help teach them to notice things about the examples presented—to see how the particular stanza or rhythmic scheme or whatever was being used by the particular words of the particular poem, for example—I got to work and with a speed which now alarms me produced a manuscript for the first edition of the book. I’ve never had more immediate fun writing a book.” Hollander’s other works of criticism include The Work of Poetry (1993), The Poetry of Everyday Life (1997), and Poetry and Music (2003).

Hollander died on August 17, 2013 in Branford, Connecticut.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Amy Clampitt was born and raised in New Providence, Iowa. She studied first at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and later at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York City. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Clampitt held various jobs at publishers and organizations such as Oxford University Press and the Audubon Society. In the 1960s, she turned her attention to poetry. In 1974 she published a small volume of poetry titled Multitudes, Multitudes; thereafter her work appeared frequently in the New Yorker. Upon the publication of her book of poems The Kingfisher in 1983, she became one of the most highly regarded poets in America. Her other collections include A Silence Opens (1994), Westward (1990), What the Light Was Like (1985), and Archaic Figure (1987). Clampitt received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Clampitt taught at the College of William and Mary, Amherst College, and Smith College.

Joseph Parisi, a Chicago Tribune Book World reviewer, called the poet’s sudden success after the publication of The Kingfisher “one of the most stunning debuts in recent memory.” Parisi continued, “throughout this bountiful book, her wit, sensibility and stylish wordplay seldom disappoint.” In one of the first articles to appear after The Kingfisher’s debut, New York Review of Books critic Helen Vendler wrote that “Amy Clampitt writes a beautiful, taxing poetry. In it, thinking uncoils and coils again, embodying its perpetua argument with itself.” Georgia Review contributor Peter Stitt also felt that “The Kingfisher is … in many ways an almost dazzling performance.” In the Observer, Peter Porter described Clampitt as “a virtuoso of the here and the palpable.” Porter ranked her with the likes of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop.

Critics praised the allusive richness and syntactical sophistication of Clampitt’s verse. Her poetry is characterized by a “baroque profusion, the romance of the adjective, labyrinthine syntax, a festival lexicon,” said New York Times Book Review contributor Alfred Corn in an article about Clampitt’s second important collection, What the Light Was Like (1985). Indeed, the poet’s use of vocabulary and syntax is elaborate. “When you read Amy Clampitt,” suggests Richard Tillinghast in the New York Times Book Review, “have a dictionary or two at your elbow.” The poet has, Tillinghast continues, a “virtuoso command of vocabulary, [a] gift for playing the English language like a musical instrument and [a] startling and delightful ability to create metaphor.” Her ability as a poet quickly gained Clampitt recognition as “the most refreshing new American poet to appear in many years,” according to one Times Literary Supplement reviewer.

Clampitt’s work is also characterized by erudite allusions, for which she provides detailed footnotes. Times Literary Supplement critic Lachlan Mackinnon compared her “finical accuracy of description and the provision of copious notes at the end of a volume,” to a similar tendency in the work of Marianne Moore. “She is as ‘literary’ and allusive as Eliot and Pound, as filled with grubby realia as William Carlos Williams, as ornamented as Wallace Stevens and as descriptive as Marianne Moore,” observed Corn. Washington Post reviewer Joel Conarroe added Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to this list of comparable poets: “Like Whitman, she is attracted to proliferating lists as well as to ‘the old thought of likenesses,’” wrote Conarroe. “And as in Crane her compressed images create multiple resonances of sound and sense.”What the Light Was Like centers around images of light and darkness. This book is “more chastely restrained than The Kingfisher,” according to Times Literary Supplement contributor Neil Corcoran. Conarroe believed that the poet’s “own imagery throughout [the book] is sensuous (even lush) and specific—in short, Keatsian.” Corn similarly commented that “there are stirring moments in each poem, and an authentic sense of Keats’ psychology.” He opined, however, that “her sequence [‘Voyages: A Homage to John Keats‘] isn’t effective throughout, the reason no doubt being that her high-lyric mode” does not suit narrative as well as a plainer style would.Clampitt’s Archaic Figure (1987) maintains her “idiosyncratic style,” as William Logan called it in the Chicago Tribune. New York Times Book Review contributor Mark Rudman noted the poet’s “spontaneity and humor; she is quick to react, hasty, impulsive, responsive to place—and to space.” In the London Sunday Times, David Profumo further praised Archaic Figure. Taking the example of the poem “Hippocrene,” the critic asserted that this work “demonstrates her new powers of economy, the sureness of her rhythmic touch and the sheer readability of her magnificent narrative skills.” “Amy Clampitt,” concluded Logan, “has become one of our poetry’s necessary imaginations.”

Clampitt died in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1994.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about World War I, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. He was also well known as a novelist and political commentator. In 1957 he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, and began writing verse in his early teenage years. Though he never attended college, Crane read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and the nineteenth-century French poets Charles Vildrac, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.

Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, the novelist and short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman.

His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature.

Hart Crane died by suicide on April 27, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, while sailing back to New York from Mexico.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Joseph Stanton’s books of poems include A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban O‘ahu, Cardinal Points, Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, and What the Kite Thinks, Moving Pictures, and Lifelines: Poems for Homer and Hopper. He has published more than 300 poems in such journals as Poetry, Harvard Review, Poetry East, The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Bamboo Ridge, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Endicott Studio’s Journal of the Mythic Arts, and New York Quarterly. In 2007, Ted Kooser selected one of Stanton’s poems for his “American Life in Poetry” column.Stanton has edited A Hawai‘i Anthology, which won a Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award for excellence in literature. Two of his other books have won honorable mention Ka Palapala Po‘okela Awards. In 1997 he received the Cades Award for his contributions to the literature of Hawai‘i.As an art historian, Stanton has published essays on Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Maurice Sendak, Chris Van Allsburg, and many other artists. His most recent nonfiction books are The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature and Stan Musial: A Biography. He teaches art history and American studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Cornelius Eady is the founder of the poetry group Cave Canem and his published collections include Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Omnation Press, 1986), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon University Press,1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), a National Book Award finalist; and Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008).

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has written seven books of poetry, one book of nonfiction, and a play. Following former fieldworker retraining in the mid-1980s, the much-decorated poet began her writing and teaching career. She now serves as distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

-bio via UC Riverside

Poet and editor Grace Schulman (b. 1935) was born Grace Waldman in New York City, the only child of a Polish Jewish immigrant father and a seventh-generation American mother. She studied at Bard College and earned her BA from American University and her PhD from New York University. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, and served as the poetry editor of the Nation from 1972 to 2006. She also directed the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center from 1973 to 1985. She has published nine collections of poetry, including Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2022 (Turtle Point Press, 2022) and Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Harper Collins, 2022). Her collection of essays, First Loves and Other Adventures (2010), reflects on her life as a writer and reader.

Typically written in a lucid free verse that occasionally reaches vatic heights, Schulman’s poems often take on subjects of art, history, and faith. Schulman’s history is usually that of her beloved New York City, where she has lived and worked as a dedicated poetry advocate all her life. Earthly moments and details of city life constantly suggest larger spiritual questions. Poet Ron Slate has described Schulman as “not only a poet of praise, but one who addresses the grounding questions of this mode. How and why do we find beauty in adversity?”

Schulman names Hopkins, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, and Marianne Moore as her influences. When Schulman was a teenager she was introduced to Moore, who had a profound effect on her poetics. Schulman wrote on the poet in a critical study, Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement (1986), and edited The Poems of Marianne Moore (2004). Schulman has received numerous awards for her work, including the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, and Pushcart prizes. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her work has been published in the Nation, the New Yorker, and numerous other magazines and journals, and appeared in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1998.

She lives in New York City and East Hampton.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

For more meditations on “lawyers’ ways,” come join our discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird over on the Close Reads Podcast!

-bio via Wikipedia

Matthew Hollis was born in Norwich in 1971, and now lives in London. His debut Ground Water (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is co-editor of Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and 101 Poems Against War (Faber & Faber, 2003), and editor of Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (Faber & Faber, 2011). Now All Roads Lead to France: the Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber & Faber, UK, 2011; Norton, US, 2012) won the Costa Biography Award and the H. W. Fisher Biography Prize, was Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Biography of the Year. He has published the handmade and letterpress pamphlets Stones (Incline Press, 2016), East (Clutag Press, 2016), Leaves (Hazel Press, 2020) and Havener (Bonnefant Press, 2022). Leaves was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2021. He is the author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Faber & Faber, UK, Norton, US, 2022). He was Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber from 2012 to 2023. His second book-length collection, Earth House, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023 and was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023.

-bio via Bloodaxe Books

Jim Daniels is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018) and Street Calligraphy (Steel Toe Books, 2017). His third collection, Places/Everyone (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985. He lives in Pittsburgh and is the Thomas Stockham University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Clifton remained employed in state and federal government positions until 1971, when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she completed two collections: Good News About the Earth (Random House, 1972) and An Ordinary Woman (Random House, 1974). She was the author of  several other collections of poetry, including Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 (BOA Editions, 1987), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Two-Headed Woman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee as well as the recipient of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize.

In 1999, Clifton was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She served as the poet laureate for the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, and distinguished professor of humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

After a long battle with cancer, Lucille Clifton died on February 13, 2010, at the age of seventy-three.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Robert Graves produced more than 140 works in his lifetime. His poems, his translations and innovative analysis of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life—including his role in World War I—Good-Bye to All That (1929), and his speculative study of poetic inspiration The White Goddess have never been out of print. He is also a renowned short story writer, with stories such as "The Tenement" still being popular today.

He earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius; King Jesus; The Golden Fleece; and Count Belisarius. He also was a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular for their clarity and entertaining style. Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

Associated with the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians, poet Donald (Grady) Davidson was born in Tennessee and earned both a BA and an MA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Davidson published five collections of poetry The Outland Piper (1924), The Tall Man (1927), Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (1938), The Long Street: Poems (1961), and Collected Poems: 1922–1961 (1966).

In the 1920s, Davidson co-founded and co-edited the influential journal The Fugitive. His prose writings include an essay in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930); a collection, Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays (1957); and Southern Writers in the Modern World (1958), which he first delivered as a lecture at Mercer University in Georgia. Davidson wrote a two-volume history of Tennessee, The Tennessee Volume One: The Old River: Frontier to Secession (1946) and The Tennessee Volume Two: The New River: Civil War to TVA (1948).

Davidson taught English at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1968. He spent summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

As the editor of the magazine The Sixties (begun as The Fifties), Bly introduced many unknown European and South American poets to an American audience. He is also the editor of numerous collections including (Beacon Press, 2007); Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems(Beacon Press, 2004), co-authored with Jane Hirshfield; The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures (HarperCollins, 1995); Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (Beacon Press, 1975); The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men (HarperCollins, 1992); News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (Sierra Club Books, 1980); and A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (American Writers Against the Vietnam War, 1966). Among his many books of translations are Lorca and Jiminez: Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1997); Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Wesleyan University Press, 1983); The Kabir Book: Ecstatic Poems (Beacon Press, 1977); Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets—Martinson, Ekeloef, and Transtromer (Beacon Press, 1975); and Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1971), co-translated with John Knoepfle and James Wright.

Bly’s honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, as well as The Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

Bly lived on a farm in the western part of Minnesota with his wife and three children until his death on November 21, 2021.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

R. S. Gwynn (born 1948) is the author of six collections of poetry, including Dogwatch (2014) and the University of Missouri Breakthrough Award winner The Drive-In (1986).

-bio via Library of Congress

For more of Belloc’s advice to the young, find yourself a copy of Cautionary Tales for Children!

-bio via Wikipedia

-bio via the poet’s website

-via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poems are all about the ineffable experience of spring. Happy reading!

The 17th-century Japanese haiku master Bashō was born Matsuo Kinsaku near Kyoto, Japan, to a minor samurai and his wife. Soon after the poet’s birth, Japan closed its borders, beginning a seclusion that allowed its native culture to flourish. It is believed that Bashō’s siblings became farmers, while Bashō, at Ueno Castle in the service of the local lord’s son, grew interested in literature. After the young lord’s early death, Bashō left the castle and moved to Kyoto, where he studied with Kigin, a distinguished local poet. During these early years Bashō studied Chinese poetry and Taoism, and soon began writing haikai no renga, a form of linked verses composed in collaboration. The opening verse of a renga, known as hokku, is structured as three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. In Bashō’s time, poets were beginning to take the hokku’s form as a template for composing small standalone poems engaging natural imagery, a form that eventually became known as haiku. Bashō was a master of the form. He published his haiku under several names, including Tosei, or “Green Peach,” out of respect for the Chinese poet Li Po, whose name translates to “White Plum.” Bashō’s haiku were published in numerous anthologies, and he edited Kai Oi, or Seashell Game (1672), and Minashiguri, or Shriveled Chestnuts (1683), anthologies that also included a selection of his own work. In his late 20s Bashō moved to Edo (now a sector of Tokyo), where he joined a rapidly growing literary community. After a gift of bashō trees from one student in 1680, the poet began to write under the name Bashō. His work, rooted in observation of the natural world as well as in historical and literary concerns, engages themes of stillness and movement in a voice that is by turns self-questioning, wry, and oracular. Soon after Bashō began to study Zen Buddhism, a fire that destroyed much of his city also took his house. Around 1682, Bashō began the months-long journeys on foot that would become the material for a new poetic form he created, called haibun. Haibun is a hybrid form alternating fragments of prose and haiku to trace a journey. Haibun imagery follows two paths: the external images observed en route, and the internal images that move through the traveler’s mind during the journey. Bashō composed several extended haibun sequences starting in 1684, including Nozarashi Kiko, or Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones (1685); Oi no Kobumi, or The Knapsack Notebook (1688); and Sarashina Kiko, or Sarashina Travelogue (1688). His most well-known haibun, Oku no Hosomichi, or Narrow Road to the Interior, recounts the last long walk Bashō completed with his disciple Sora—1,200 miles covered over five months beginning in May 1689. While their days were spent walking, in the evenings they often socialized and wrote with students and friends who lived along their route. The route was also planned to include views that had previously been described by other poets; Bashō alludes to these earlier poems in his own descriptions, weaving fragments of literary and historical conversation into his solitary journey. Bashō revised his final haibun until shortly before his death in 1694. It was first published in 1702, and hundreds of editions have since been published in several languages.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Thomas Nashe (1567 - c. 1601) –English pamphleteer, poet, dramatist, and novelist– was the first of the English prose eccentrics. Nashe wrote in a vigorous combination of colloquial diction and idiosyncratic coined compounds that was ideal for controversy. Among his works are the satire Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592); the masque Summers Last Will and Testament (1592, published 1600); The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), the first picaresque novel in English; and Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599). The play Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594) was a collaboration with Christopher Marlowe.

-bio via Britannica

- bio via Britannica.com

Phillis Levin (born 1954) is the author of four poetry collections, including May Day (Penguin, 2008). She also served as editor for The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001) and teaches at Hofstra University.

-bio via Library of Congress

-bio via Wikipedia

Born in Cumberland, British Romantic poet and prose writer Dorothy Wordsworth was the third of five children. Her mother died when Wordsworth was six, and she moved to Halifax to live with her aunt. In 1781 she enrolled in Hipperholme Boarding School. When her father died in 1783, the family’s financial situation worsened and the children were sent to live with their uncles. Wordsworth changed schools, entering Miss Medlin’s school, where she first read Milton, Shakespeare, and Homer. She later moved to live with an uncle in Penrith, where she was tutored by yet another uncle, the Reverend William Cookson, who also tutored the sons of King George III. Starting in 1788, Wordsworth lived with Cookson and his new wife, and helped to care for their children.

She remained particularly close to her brother, the poet William Wordsworth, and the siblings lived together in Dorset and Alfoxden before William married her best friend, Mary Hutchinson, in 1802. Thereafter Dorothy Wordsworth made her home with the couple.

An avid naturalist, Wordsworth enjoyed daily nature walks with her brother, and images from the notes she took of these walks often recur in her brother’s poems. Most of her writing explores the natural world.

Although Wordsworth did not publish her work, many of her journals, travelogues, and poems have been posthumously collected and published, including her four-volume Alfoxden journal, which she kept from May 1799 to December 1802, and her journals from 1824 to 1835, which include a travelogue and notes on life at Rydal Mount, where she lived with William and his family beginning in 1813. Wordsworth also wrote several children’s stories.In her later years, she struggled with addictions to opium and laudanum, and her mental health deteriorated. Until his death in 1850, her brother was her main caretaker.

-bio via Poetry Foundation