Edgar Allan Poe published his 1st poetry collection in 1827, at 18 years old. A tendency to run up debts & gamble kept him in constant state of reinvention.
National Poetry Month: Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was born to a prominent Boston family. He attended Harvard for two years, and then transferred to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom. Then he took graduate courses at Louisiana State University, where he studied under Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. His second book of poetry, Lord […]
National Poetry Month: Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) became widely known and appreciated only after her suicide. She published her first poem at age 18 (in the Christian Science Monitor) and had only one book of poetry, Colossus, published by the time of her death. (Before her death, she had published the semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria […]
National Poetry Month: Jack Gilbert
Jack Gilbert (1925 – ) published his first book of poems, Views of Jeopardy, in 1962, and his second, Monolithos, nearly 20 years later. In between he moved to Europe, traveled as a lecturer on American literature for the U.S. State Department. He’s also the author of three other books of poetry: Transgressions: Selected Poems, […]
National Poetry Month: Edna St. Vincent Millay
At the age of 20, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) entered her poem “Renascence” in a contest and won fourth place, which meant publication in The Lyric Year – and a scholarship to Vassar (makes you wonder what the first place winner received). She graduated in 1917, and that same year published her first volume, […]
National Poetry Month: The Best American Poetry 2009
It takes work to put together an anthology like The Best American Poetry 2009. The editor, in this case David Wagoner, reads scores of literary journals (online and print), general publications, and books of poetry, sifting through literally thousands of poems to select 75 that he or she considers the best of the year. Wagoner, […]
National Poetry Month: T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is credited with having written the single most influential poetic work of the 20th century, The Waste Land (1922). (Think “April is the cruellest month…”) A native of Missouri (there are Eliot family connections all over St. Louis), he lived in England for most of his life and became a British […]
National Poetry Month: Donald Hall
Donald Hall (1928 – ) attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference when he was 16, the year he published his first work. Over his career, he’s published numerous works of poetry; written several works of non-fiction, including two biographies; written several children’s books; edited numerous anthologies and textbooks; written short stories; and was named U.S. […]
National Poetry Month: Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich (1929 – ) is no stranger to controversy. During the 1960s, her poetry became more confrontational, exploring women’s issues, racism and the Vietnam War. In 1973, she published Diving Into the Wreck, which won the National Book Award for poetry and which Rich shared with her fellow nominees Alica Walker and Audre Lord. […]
National Poetry Month: Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967) wrote 14 books of poetry, three books of poetry in translation, innumerable plays that have been published in some 11 works, letters, short stories, novels – an incredibly productive and creative career. All of his work, collectively and individually, represent a profound chronicle of African-American life from the 1920s to […]
National Poetry Month: Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) is another writer whose poetry, like Walt Whitman and Robert Frost’s, could qualify him as “America’s Poet.”
National Poetry Month: Louise Gluck
A native of New York, Louise Gluck has written numerous books of poetry (including A Village Life: Poems, reviewed here last November), won the Pulitzer Prize and a host of other awards and prizes, and in 2003 became the U.S. Poet Laureate and the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In 2008, she […]
National Poetry Month: John Ashbery
John Ashbery (1927 – ) has won just about every poetry prize there is to win: the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie (the first English-language poet to win), the Bollingen Prize, the English […]
National Poetry Month: Gary Soto
Need poetry teaching resources? Check out our collection of poets, poems, and poetry classroom discussions led by poets and professors.
National Poetry Month: Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) published her first poem in a children’s magazine when she was 13; by 17, she had some 75 published poems in her portfolio. At 33, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the first African-American to achieve that honor. In 1985, she was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress. […]
National Poetry Month: Wendell Berry’s “Leavings”
Author, poet and essayist Wendell Berry has been known for talking walks on Sunday mornings, walks that he uses for both observation and meditation. Most of Leavings: Poems is a kind of historical record of those walks, poems that observe, poems that are a meditation, and sometimes poems that are both. It is a beautiful […]
National Poetry Month: L.L. Barkat
I met L.L. Barkat because I had a bike crash and broke several ribs. It took a few days to figure out that I had broken bones (and a partially collapsed lung), and leaving a few nights later for the emergency room, I grabbed Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places from my […]
National Poetry Month: Robert Frost
If there are any poems I can remember studying in school, they are “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, ” “The Road Not Taken”and “Mending Wall, ” all by Robert Frost (1874-1963). While Walt Whitman has been called “American’s Poet, ” Frost has been called America’s most beloved poet. So much has been said […]
National Poetry Month: Maureen Doallas
Maureen Doallas is one of our regular contributors to the Tweetspeak Poetry-sponsored poetry jams on Twitter. She writes beautiful words, and not just poetry. She blogs at Writing Without Paper, where she covers poetry, art and culture in general – and covers them comprehensively and with great depth and insight. Below are two of Maureen’s poems. […]
National Poetry Month: Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) has been called “America’s Poet.” When he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 (and he kept revising and republishing it for a long time), he changed the direction of American poetry and letters. For decades, some of his poems were memorized in schoolrooms across the United States. Time […]