Robert Browning

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell, England. His mother was an accomplished pianist and a devout evangelical Christian. His father, who worked as a bank clerk, was also an artist, scholar, antiquarian, and collector of books and pictures. His rare book collection of more than 6,000 volumes included works in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. Much of Browning's education came from his well-read father. It is believed that he was already proficient at reading and writing by the age of five. A bright and anxious student, Browning learned Latin, Greek, and French by the time he was fourteen. From fourteen to sixteen he was educated at home, attended to by various tutors in music, drawing, dancing, and horsemanship. At the age of twelve he wrote a volume of Byronic verse entitled Incondita, which his parents attempted, unsuccessfully, to have published. In 1825, a cousin gave Browning a collection of Shelley's poetry; Browning was so taken with the book that he asked for the rest of Shelley's works for his thirteenth birthday, and declared himself a vegetarian and an atheist in emulation of the poet. Despite this early passion, he apparently wrote no poems between the ages of thirteen and twenty. In 1828, Browning enrolled at the University of London, but he soon left, anxious to read and learn at his own pace. The random nature of his education later surfaced in his writing, leading to criticism of his poems' obscurities.
In 1833, Browning anonymously published his first major published work, Pauline, and in 1840 he published Sordello, which was widely regarded as a failure. He also tried his hand at drama, but his plays, including Strafford, which ran for five nights in 1837, and the Bells and Pomegranates series, were for the most part unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the techniques he developed through his dramatic monologues—especially his use of diction, rhythm, and symbol—are regarded as his most important contribution to poetry, influencing such major poets of the twentieth century as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost.
After reading Elizabeth Barrett's Poems (1844) and corresponding with her for a few months, Browning met her in 1845. They were married in 1846, against the wishes of Barrett's father. The couple moved to Pisa and then Florence, where they continued to write. They had a son, Robert "Pen" Browning, in 1849, the same year his Collected Poems was published. Elizabeth inspired Robert's collection of poems Men and Women (1855), which he dedicated to her. Now regarded as one of Browning's best works, the book was received with little notice at the time; its author was then primarily known as Elizabeth Barrett's husband.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in 1861, and Robert and Pen Browning soon moved to London. Browning went on to publish Dramatis Personae (1863), and The Ring and the Book (1868). The latter, based on a seventeenth-century Italian murder trial, received wide critical acclaim, finally earning a twilight of reknown and respect in Browning's career. The Browning Society was founded while he still lived, in 1881, and he was awarded honorary degrees by Oxford University in 1882 and the University of Edinburgh in 1884. Robert Browning died on the same day that his final volume of verse, Asolando, was published, in 1889.

Poetry
Asolando: Fancies and Facts (1889)Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning (1895)Dramatic Idyls (1879)Dramatic Idyls: Second Series (1880)Ferishtah's Fancies (1884)Jocoseria (1883)La Saisiaz, and The Two Poets of Croisicv (1878)Men and Women (1855)New Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1914)Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper, with Other Poems (1876)Paracelsus (1835)Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887)Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or, Turf and Towers (1873)Robert Browning: The Poems (1981)Robert Browning: The Ring and the Book (1971)Sordell (1840)The Brownings to the Tennysons (1971)The Complete Works of Robert Browning (1898)The Inn Album (1875)The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (1868)The Ring and the Book (1868)The Works of Robert Browning (1912)Two Poems (1854)

Prose
Browning to His American Friends (1965)Dearest Isa: Browning's Letters to Isa Blagden (1951)Learned Lady: Letters from Robert Browning to Mrs. Thomas FitzGerald 1876-1889 (1966)Letters of Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J. Wise (1933)New Letters of Robert Browning (1950)Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed in Their Letters (1937)The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, 1845-1846 (1969)Thomas Jones, The Divine Order: Sermons (1884)

Anthology
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877)

Drama
Aristophanes' Apology (1875)Balaustion's Adventure, Including a Transcript from Euripides (1871)Bells and Pomegranates, No. IV - The Return of the Druses: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1943)Bells and Pomegranates. No. I - Pippa Passes (1841)Bells and Pomegranates. No. II - King Victor and King Charles (1842)Bells and Pomegranates. No. III - Dramatic Lyrics (1842)Bells and Pomegranates. No. V - A Blot in the 'Scutcheon: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1843)Bells and Pomegranates. No. V - Colombe's Birthday: A Play in Five Acts (1844)Bells and Pomegranates. No. VII - Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (1845)Bells and Pomegranates. No. VIII - and Last, Luria; and A Soul's Tragedy (1846)Dramatis Personae (1864)Fifine at the Fair (1872)Poems: A New Edition (1849)Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871)Strafford: An Historical Tragedy (1837)

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon. The son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, he was probably educated at the King Edward IV Grammar School in Stratford, where he learned Latin and a little Greek and read the Roman dramatists. At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman seven or eight years his senior. Together they raised two daughters: Susanna, who was born in 1583, and Judith (whose twin brother died in boyhood), born in 1585.
Little is known about Shakespeare's activities between 1585 and 1592. Robert Greene's A Groatsworth of Wit alludes to him as an actor and playwright. Shakespeare may have taught at school during this period, but it seems more probable that shortly after 1585 he went to London to begin his apprenticeship as an actor. Due to the plague, the London theaters were often closed between June 1592 and April 1594. During that period, Shakespeare probably had some income from his patron, Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first two poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The fomer was a long narrative poem depicting the rejection of Venus by Adonis, his death, and the consequent disappearance of beauty from the world. Despite conservative objections to the poem's glorification of sensuality, it was immensely popular and was reprinted six times during the nine years following its publication.
In 1594, Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain's company of actors, the most popular of the companies acting at Court. In 1599 Shakespeare joined a group of Chamberlain's Men that would form a syndicate to build and operate a new playhouse: the Globe, which became the most famous theater of its time. With his share of the income from the Globe, Shakespeare was able to purchase New Place, his home in Stratford.
While Shakespeare was regarded as the foremost dramatist of his time, evidence indicates that both he and his world looked to poetry, not playwriting, for enduring fame. Shakespeare's sonnets were composed between 1593 and 1601, though not published until 1609. That edition, The Sonnets of Shakespeare, consists of 154 sonnets, all written in the form of three quatrains and a couplet that is now recognized as Shakespearean. The sonnets fall into two groups: sonnets 1-126, addressed to a beloved friend, a handsome and noble young man, and sonnets 127-152, to a malignant but fascinating "Dark Lady," whom the poet loves in spite of himself. Nearly all of Shakespeare's sonnets examine the inevitable decay of time, and the immortalization of beauty and love in poetry.
In his poems and plays, Shakespeare invented thousands of words, often combining or contorting Latin, French and native roots. His impressive expansion of the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, includes such words as: arch-villain, birthplace, bloodsucking, courtship, dewdrop, downstairs, fanged, heartsore, hunchbacked, leapfrog, misquote, pageantry, radiance, schoolboy, stillborn, watchdog, and zany.
Shakespeare wrote more than 30 plays. These are usually divided into four categories: histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. His earliest plays were primarily comedies and histories such as Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, but in 1596, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, his second tragedy, and over the next dozen years he would return to the form, writing the plays for which he is now best known: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In his final years, Shakespeare turned to the romantic with Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
Only eighteen of Shakespeare's plays were published separately in quarto editions during his lifetime; a complete collection of his works did not appear until the publication of the First Folio in 1623, several years after his death. Nonetheless, his contemporaries recognized Shakespeare's achievements. Francis Meres cited "honey-tongued" Shakespeare for his plays and poems in 1598, and the Chamberlain's Men rose to become the leading dramatic company in London, installed as members of the royal household in 1603.
Sometime after 1612, Shakespeare retired from the stage and returned to his home in Stratford. He drew up his will in January of 1616, which included his famous bequest to his wife of his "second best bed." He died on April 23, 1616, and was buried two days later at Stratford Church.

Poetry
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1609)Venus and Adonis (1593)

Drama
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)All's Well that Ends Well (1602)Antony and Cleopatra (1607)As You Like It (1599)Coriolanus (1608)Cymbeline (1609)Hamlet (1600)Henry IV (1597)Henry V (1598)Henry VI (Parts I, II, and III) (1590)Henry VIII (1612)Julius Caesar (1599)King John (1596)King Lear (1605)Love's Labour's Lost (1593)Macbeth (1606)Measure for Measure (1604)Much Ado About Nothing (1598)Othello (1604)Pericles (1608)Richard II (1595)Richard III (1594)Romeo and Juliet (1596)The Comedy of Errors (1590)The Merchant of Venice (1596)The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597)The Taming of the Shrew (1593)The Tempest (1611)The Winter's Tale (1610)Timon of Athens (1607)Titus Andronicus (1590)Troilus and Cressida (1600)Twelfth Night (1599)Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592)

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry--stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.

Poetry
A Draft of Cantos XXXI-XLI (1934)A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930)A Lume Spento (1908)Cantos I-XVI (1925)Cantos LII-LXXI (1940)Cantos XVII-XXVII (1928)Canzoni (1911)Exultations (1909)Homage to Sextus Propertius (1934)Lustra and Other Poems (1917)Patria Mia (1950)Personae (1909)Provenca (1910)Quia Pauper Amavi (1919)The Cantos (1972)The Fifth Decade of Cantos (1937)The Pisan Cantos (1948)Umbra: Collected Poems (1920)

Prose
ABC of Economics (1933)Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924)Digest of the Analects (1937)Gaudier Brzeska (1916)Guide to Kulchur (1938)How To Read (1931)Imaginary Letters (1930)Indiscretions (1923)Instigations (1920)Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935)Literary Essays (1954)Make It New (1934)Pavannes and Divisions (1918)Polite Essays (1936)Prolegomena: Volume I (1932)Selected Prose: 1909-1965 (1973)Social Credit and Impact (1935)The ABC of Reading (1934)The Spirit of Romance (1953)What is Money For? (1939)

Anthology
Cathay (1915)The Classic Anthology Defined (1954)The Great Digest, and the Unwobbling Point (1951)The Translations of Ezra Pound (1953)

Anne Sexton

Anne Gray Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. She enrolled in a modeling course at the Hart Agency and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore. In 1953 she gave birth to a daughter. In 1954 she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, suffered her first mental breakdown, and was admitted to Westwood Lodge, a neuropsychiatric hospital she would repeatedly return to for help. In 1955, following the birth of her second daughter, Sexton suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized again; her children were sent to live with her husband's parents. That same year, on her birthday, she attempted suicide.
She was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest in writing poetry she had developed in high school, and in the fall of 1957 she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. In her introduction to Anne Sexton's Complete Poems, the poet Maxine Kumin, who was enrolled with Sexton in the 1957 workshop and became her close friend, describes her belief that it was the writing of poetry that gave Sexton something to work towards and develop and thus enabled her to endure life for as long as she did. In 1974 at the age of 46, despite a successful writing career--she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for Live or Die--she lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.
Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other "confessional" poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. She made the experience of being a woman a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter.

Poetry
45 Mercy Street (1976)All My Pretty Ones (1962)Live or Die (1966)Love Poems (1969)Selected Poems (1964)The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)The Book of Folly (1973)The Complete Poems (1981)The Death Notebooks (1974)To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)Transformations (1971)Words for Dr. Y.: Uncollected Poems (1978)

Prose Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977)

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917 and raised in Chicago. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991); Blacks (1987); To Disembark (1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986); Riot (1969); In the Mecca (1968); The Bean Eaters (1960); Annie Allen (1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and A Street in Bronzeville (1945). She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, Maud Martha (1953), and Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972), and edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (1971). In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985-86 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

Poetry
A Street in Bronzeville (1945)

Aloneness (1971)

Annie Allen (1949)

Aurora (1972)

Beckonings (1975)

Black Love (1981)

Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali (1971)

Blacks (1987)

Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956)

Children Coming Home (1991)

Family Pictures (1970)

In the Mecca (1968)

Riot (1970)

Selected Poems (1963)

The Bean Eaters (1960)

The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986)

The Wall (1967)

The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971)

To Disembark (1981)

We Real Cool (1966)

Winnie (1988)

Prose
A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (1975)Primer for Blacks (1981)Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972)Very Young Poets (1983)Young Poet's Primer (1981)

Fiction
Maud Martha (1953)This bio was last updated on , . --->

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was very young her father died, her mother was committed to a mental asylum, and she was sent to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia. She earned a bachelor's degree from Vassar College in 1934.
She was independently wealthy, and from 1935 to 1937 she spent time traveling to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery which surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse, North and South, published in 1946.
She was influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a close friend, mentor, and stabilizing force in her life. Unlike her contemporary and good friend Robert Lowell, who wrote in the "confessional" style, Bishop's poetry avoids explicit accounts of her personal life, and focuses instead with great subtlety on her impressions of the physical world.
Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. She lived for many years in Brazil, communicating with friends and colleagues in America only by letter. She wrote slowly and published sparingly (her Collected Poems number barely a hundred), but the technical brilliance and formal variety of her work is astonishing. For years she was considered a "poet's poet," but with the publication of her last book, Geography III, in 1976, Bishop was finally established as a major force in contemporary literature.
Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets in 1964 and served as a Chancellor from 1966 to 1979. She died in Cambridge, Massachussetts, in 1979, and her stature as a major poet continues to grow through the high regard of the poets and critics who have followed her.

Poetry
North and South (1946)Poems: North and South—A Cold Spring (1955)Poems (1956)Questions of Travel (1965)The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (1968)The Complete Poems (1969)Poem (1973)Geography III (1977)The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (1983)Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (2006)

Prose
Brazil (1962)The Collected Prose (1984)One Art: Letters (1993)

Anthology

The Diary of Helena Morley (1977)

William Blake

William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757, to James, a hosier, and Catherine Blake. Two of his six siblings died in infancy. From early childhood, Blake spoke of having visions—at four he saw God "put his head to the window"; around age nine, while walking through the countryside, he saw a tree filled with angels. Although his parents tried to discourage him from "lying," they did observe that he was different from his peers and did not force him to attend conventional school. He learned to read and write at home. At age ten, Blake expressed a wish to become a painter, so his parents sent him to drawing school. Two years later, Blake began writing poetry. When he turned fourteen, he apprenticed with an engraver because art school proved too costly. One of Blake's assignments as apprentice was to sketch the tombs at Westminster Abbey, exposing him to a variety of Gothic styles from which he would draw inspiration throughout his career. After his seven-year term ended, he studied briefly at the Royal Academy.
In 1782, he married an illiterate woman named Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her to read and to write, and also instructed her in draftsmanship. Later, she helped him print the illuminated poetry for which he is remembered today; the couple had no children. In 1784 he set up a printshop with a friend and former fellow apprentice, James Parker, but this venture failed after several years. For the remainder of his life, Blake made a meager living as an engraver and illustrator for books and magazines. In addition to his wife, Blake also began training his younger brother Robert in drawing, painting, and engraving. Robert fell ill during the winter of 1787 and succumbed, probably to consumption. As Robert died, Blake saw his brother's spirit rise up through the ceiling, "clapping its hands for joy." He believed that Robert's spirit continued to visit him and later claimed that in a dream Robert taught him the printing method that he used in Songs of Innocence and other "illuminated" works.
Blake's first printed work, Poetical Sketches (1783), is a collection of apprentice verse, mostly imitating classical models. The poems protest against war, tyranny, and King George III's treatment of the American colonies. He published his most popular collection, Songs of Innocence, in 1789 and followed it, in 1794, with Songs of Experience. Some readers interpret Songs of Innocence in a straightforward fashion, considering it primarily a children's book, but others have found hints at parody or critique in its seemingly naive and simple lyrics. Both books of Songs were printed in an illustrated format reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. The text and illustrations were printed from copper plates, and each picture was finished by hand in watercolors.
Blake was a nonconformist who associated with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day, such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In defiance of 18th-century neoclassical conventions, he privileged imagination over reason in the creation of both his poetry and images, asserting that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. He declared in one poem, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." Works such as "The French Revolution" (1791), "America, a Prophecy" (1793), "Visions of the Daughters of Albion" (1793), and "Europe, a Prophecy" (1794) express his opposition to the English monarchy, and to 18th-century political and social tyranny in general. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794). In the prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), he satirized oppressive authority in church and state, as well as the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish philosopher whose ideas once attracted his interest.
In 1800 Blake moved to the seacoast town of Felpham, where he lived and worked until 1803 under the patronage of William Hayley. He taught himself Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian, so that he could read classical works in their original language. In Felpham he experienced profound spiritual insights that prepared him for his mature work, the great visionary epics written and etched between about 1804 and 1820. Milton (1804-08), Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797; rewritten after 1800), and Jerusalem (1804-20) have neither traditional plot, characters, rhyme, nor meter. They envision a new and higher kind of innocence, the human spirit triumphant over reason.
Blake believed that his poetry could be read and understood by common people, but he was determined not to sacrifice his vision in order to become popular. In 1808 he exhibited some of his watercolors at the Royal Academy, and in May of 1809 he exhibited his works at his brother James's house. Some of those who saw the exhibit praised Blake's artistry, but others thought the paintings "hideous" and more than a few called him insane. Blake's poetry was not well known by the general public, but he was mentioned in A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1816. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been lent a copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, considered Blake a "man of Genius," and Wordsworth made his own copies of several songs. Charles Lamb sent a copy of "The Chimney Sweeper" from Songs of Innocence to James Montgomery for his Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing Boys' Album (1824), and Robert Southey (who, like Wordsworth, considered Blake insane) attended Blake's exhibition and included the "Mad Song" from Poetical Sketches in his miscellany, The Doctor (1834-1837).
Blake's final years, spent in great poverty, were cheered by the admiring friendship of a group of younger artists who called themselves "the Ancients." In 1818 he met John Linnell, a young artist who helped him financially and also helped to create new interest in his work. It was Linnell who, in 1825, commissioned him to design illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, the cycle of drawings that Blake worked on until his death in 1827.

Poetry
All Religions Are One (1788)America, a Prophecy (1793)Europe, a Prophecy (1794)For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793)For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1820)Poetical Sketches (1783)Songs of Experience (1794)Songs of Innocence (1789)The Book of Ahania (1795)The Book of Los (1795)The First Book of Urizen (1794)The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)The Song of Los (1795)There Is No Natural Religion (1788)Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)This bio was last updated on , . --->
Poems by William Blake
A Divine Image
A Poison Tree
Auguries of Innocence
From "Milton"
Infant Joy
London
Proverbs of Hell
The Chimney-Sweeper
The Divine Image
The Lamb
The Tyger

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.
It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.
As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century (most notably John Donne) and the 19th century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poems include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.
He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and was remarried, to Valerie Fletcher, in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.

Poetry
Ash Wednesday (1930)Burnt Norton (1941)Collected Poems (1962)East Coker (1940)Four Quartets (1943)Poems (1919)Poems, 1909-1925 (1925)Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)The Dry Salvages (1941)The Waste Land (1922)

Prose
After Strange Gods (1933)Andrew Marvell (1922)Dante (1929)Elizabethan Essays (1934)Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)For Lancelot Andrews (1928)John Dryden (1932)Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)Poetry and Drama (1951)Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)The Sacred Wood (1920)The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)

Drama
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)Sweeney Agonistes (1932)The Cocktail Party (1950)The Confidential Clerk (1953)The Elder Statesman (1958)The Family Reunion (1939)The Rock (1934)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett, an English poet of the Romantic Movement, was born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. The oldest of twelve children, Elizabeth was the first in her family born in England in over two hundred years. For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labor. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, chose to raise his family in England, while his fortune grew in Jamaica. Educated at home, Elizabeth apparently had read passages from Paradise Lost and a number of Shakespearean plays, among other great works, before the age of ten. By her twelfth year she had written her first "epic" poem, which consisted of four books of rhyming couplets. Two years later, Elizabeth developed a lung ailment that plagued her for the rest of her life. Doctors began treating her with morphine, which she would take until her death. While saddling a pony when she was fifteen, Elizabeth also suffered a spinal injury. Despite her ailments, her education continued to flourish. Throughout her teenage years, Elizabeth taught herself Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament; her interests later turned to Greek studies. Accompanying her appetite for the classics was a passionate enthusiasm for her Christian faith. She became active in the Bible and Missionary Societies of her church.
In 1826 Elizabeth anonymously published her collection An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. Two years later, her mother passed away. The slow abolition of slavery in England and mismanagement of the plantations depleted the Barrett's income, and in 1832, Elizabeth's father sold his rural estate at a public auction. He moved his family to a coastal town and rented cottages for the next three years, before settling permanently in London. While living on the sea coast, Elizabeth published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus.
Gaining notoriety for her work in the 1830's, Elizabeth continued to live in her father's London house under his tyrannical rule. He began sending Elizabeth's younger siblings to Jamaica to help with the family's estates. Elizabeth bitterly opposed slavery and did not want her siblings sent away. During this time, she wrote The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), expressing Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. Due to her weakening disposition she was forced to spend a year at the sea of Torquay accompanied by her brother Edward, whom she referred to as "Bro." He drowned later that year while sailing at Torquay and Elizabeth returned home emotionally broken, becoming an invalid and a recluse. She spent the next five years in her bedroom at her father's home. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a collection entitled simply Poems. This volume gained the attention of poet Robert Browning, whose work Elizabeth had praised in one of her poems, and he wrote her a letter.
Elizabeth and Robert, who was six years her junior, exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months. Immortalized in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier (1878-1942), their romance was bitterly opposed by her father, who did not want any of his children to marry. In 1846, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth's health improved and she bore a son, Robert Wideman Browning. Her father never spoke to her again. Elizabeth's Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets—one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English—to be her best work. Admirers have compared her imagery to Shakespeare and her use of the Italian form to Petrarch.
Political and social themes embody Elizabeth's later work. She expressed her intense sympathy for the struggle for the unification of Italy in Casa Guidi Windows (1848-51) and Poems Before Congress (1860). In 1857 Browning published her verse novel Aurora Leigh, which portrays male domination of a woman. In her poetry she also addressed the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, the child labor mines and mills of England, and slavery, among other social injustices. Although this decreased her popularity, Elizabeth was heard and recognized around Europe.Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence on June 29, 1861.

Poetry
A Drama of Exile: and other Poems (1845)An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826)Aurora Leigh (1857)Casa Guidi Windows: A Poem (1851)Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories (1914)Last Poems (1862)Miscellaneous Poems (1833)Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems (1860)New Poems by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1914)Poems (1844)Poems before Congress (1860)Poems: Fourth Edition (1856)Poems: New Edition (1850)Poems: Third Edition (1853)Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)The Battle of Marathon: A Poem (1820)The Complete Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1900)The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1900)The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1889)The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897)The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838)Two Poems (1854)

Prose
"Queen Annelida and False Arcite;" "The Complaint of Annelida to False Arcite," (1841)"The Daughters of Pandarus" from the Odyssey (1846)A New Spirit of the Age (1844)Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1831-1832 (1969)Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849-1861 (1973)Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846-1859 (1929)Invisible Friends (1972)Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B. R. Haydon (1939)Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne (1877)Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett (1958)Letters to Robert Browning and Other Correspondents by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1916)New Letters from Mrs. Browning to Isa Blagden (1951)Psyche Apocalyptè: A Lyrical Drama (1876)The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (1863)The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897)The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-1846 (1969)The Poet's Enchiridion (1914)The Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford (1954)Twenty Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd (1950)Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd (1955)
Anthology

Pablo Neruda

Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in southern Chile on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. In 1923 he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario ("Twilight"). He published the volume under the pseudonym "Pablo Neruda" to avoid conflict with his family, who disapproved of his occupation. The following year, he found a publisher for Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada ("Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair"). The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself to his craft.
In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the Latin American tradition of honoring poets with diplomatic assignments. After serving as honorary consul in Burma, Neruda was named Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1933. While there, he began a friendship with the visiting Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. After transferring to Madrid later that year, Neruda also met Spanish writer Manuel Altolaguirre. Together the two men founded a literary review called Caballo verde para la poesîa in 1935. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 interrupted Neruda's poetic and political development. He chronicled the horrendous years which included the execution of García Lorca in Espana en el corazon (1937), published from the war front. Neruda's outspoken sympathy for the loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War led to his recall from Madrid in 1937. He then returned to Europe to help settle republican refugees in the United States.
Neruda returned to Chile in 1938 where he renewed his political activity and wrote prolifically. Named Chilean Consul to Mexico in 1939, Neruda left Chile again for four years. Upon returning to Chile in 1943, he was elected to the Senate and joined the Communist Party. When the Chilean government moved to the right, they declared communism illegal and expelled Neruda from the Senate. He went into hiding. During those years he wrote and published Canto general (1950).
In 1952 the government withdrew the order to arrest leftist writers and political figures, and Neruda returned to Chile and married Matilde Urrutia, his third wife (his first two marriages, to Maria Antonieta Haagenar Vogelzang and Delia del Carril, both ended in divorce). For the next twenty-one years, he continued a career that integrated private and public concerns and became known as the people's poet. During this time, Neruda received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Diagnosed with cancer while serving a two-year term as ambassador to France, Neruda resigned his position thus ending his diplomatic career. On September 23, 1973, just twelve days after the defeat of Chile's democratic regime, the man widely regarded as the greatest Latin-American poet since Darío, died of leukemia in Santiago, Chile.
A Selected Bibliography

Poetry
Alturas de Macchu-Picchu (1948)

Anillos (1926)

Canto General (1950)

Cantos ceremoniales (1961)

Cien sonetos de amor (1959)

El corazon amarillo (1974)

El mar y las campanas: Poemas (1973)

Espana en el corazon: Himno a las glorias del pueblo en la guerra (1937)

Estravagario (1958)

Jardin de invierno (1974)

La rosa separada (1973)

Las piedras de Chile (1961)

Las piedras del cielo (1970)

Las uvas y el viento (1954)

Libro de las preguntas (1974)

Los versos del capitan: Poemas de amor (1952)

Memorial de Isla Negra (1964)

Odas elementales (1954)

Plenos poderes (1962)

Residencia en la tierra (1933)

Viente poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (1924)

Prose
Confieso que he vivido: Memorias (1974)

Correspondancia (1980)

Discurso pronunciado con ocasion de la entrega del premio Nobel de literatura (1971)

El habitante y su esperanza (1925)

Anthology
Cuarenta y cuatro (1967)

Paginas escogidas de Anatole France (1924)

Romeo y Julieta (1964)

Visiones de las hijas de Albion y el viajero mental (1935)

Visiones de las hijas de Albion y el viajero mental (1935)

Drama
Fulgor y muerte de Joaquin Murieta: Bandido chileno injusticiado en California el 23 julio 1853 (1967)

Poetry in Translation
100 Love Sonnets (1986)

A New Decade: Poems, 1958-1967 (1969)

A Separate Rose (1985)

Extravagaria (1972)

Five Decades: A Selection (Poems 1925-1970) (1974)

Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon : Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda (1998)

Fully Empowered: Plenos poderes (1975)

Isla Negra: A Notebook (1980)

Late and Posthumous Poems, 1968-1974 (1989)

Memoirs (1976)

Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (1971)

New Poems, 1968-1970 (1972)

Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra Face to Face (1977)

Pablo Neruda: An Anthology of Odes (1994)

Pablo Neruda: The Early Poems (1969)

Passions and Impressions (1982)

Residence on Earth (1962)

Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda (1990)

Selected Poems (1970)

Spain in the Heart: Hymn to the Glories of the People at War (1993)

Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta (1972)

Stones of the Sky (1970)

The Book of Questions (1991)

The Captain's Verses (1972)

The Heights of Macchu Picchu (1966)

The House at Isla Negra (1988)

The Sea and the Bells (1988)

The Stones of Chile (1987)

The Yellow Heart (1990)

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1969)

Twenty Poems (1967)

Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile (1984)

Winter Garden (1986)

The Essential Neruda (2004)

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1914. He was a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from school and preferred reading on his own; he read all of D. H. Lawrence's poetry, impressed by Lawrence's descriptions of a vivid natural world. Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and reading, but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published to great acclaim when he was twenty. Thomas did not sympathize with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden's thematic concerns with social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, has more in common with the Romantic tradition. Thomas first visited America in January 1950, at the age of thirty-five. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and notorious, for Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling. He became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. Tragically, he died from alcoholism at the age of 39 after a particularly long drinking bout in New York City in 1953.

Poetry

Collected Poems (1952)

Deaths and Entrances (1946)

Eighteen Poems (1934)

In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (1952)

New Poems (1942)

New Poems (1943)

Poems (1971)

The Map of Love (1939)

The World I Breath (1939)

Twenty-Five Poems (1936)

Prose

A Child's Christmas in Wales (1954)

A Prospect of the Sea (1955)

Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other Stories (1955)

Collected Prose (1969)

Early Prose Writings (1971)

Letters to Vernon Watkins (1957)

Notebooks (1934)

Quite Early One Morning (1954)

The Beach of Falesá (1964)

The Doctor and the Devils (1953)

The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940)

Under Milkwood (1954)
Drama
Under Milk Wood (1954)This bio was last updated on , . --->

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809. Poe's father and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three and John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and later to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave the University when Allan refused to pay his gambling debts.
Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, he moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems, was published that year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Neither volume received significant critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy, but he was again forced to leave for lack of financial support. He then moved into the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. He brought his aunt and twelve-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, with him to Richmond. He married Virginia in 1836. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short-story writer, and an editor. He published some of his best-known stories and poems including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Raven." After Virginia's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe's life-long struggle with depression and alcoholism worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of "acute congestion of the brain."
Poe's work as an editor, a poet, and a critic had a profound impact on American and international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the "architect" of the modern short story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of the style and of the structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner to the "art for art's sake" movement. French Symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French. Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature.
Selected Bibliography

Poetry
Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)

Poems (1831)

The Raven and Other Poems (1845)

Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)

Fiction
Berenice (1835)

Ligeia (1838)

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1939)

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

The Black Cat (1843)

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

The Purloined Letter (1845)

The Cask of Amontillado (1846)

The Oval Portrait (1850)

The Narrative of Arthut Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850)

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees.
In 1940, when Sylvia was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegaic and infamous poem, "Daddy."
Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of 11 and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.
In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed to graduate summa cum laude in 1955.
After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet, Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.
Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957, and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England where she gave birth to the couple's two children, Freida and Nicholas Hughes, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.
In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.
In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.
Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to poets such as her teacher, Robert Lowell, and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.
Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.

Poetry
The Colossus (1960)

Ariel (1965)

Crossing the Water (1971)

Winter Trees (1972)

The Collected Poems (1981)

Prose
The Bell Jar (1963)

Letters Home (1975,to and edited by her mother)

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977)

The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

The Magic Mirror (1989, Plath's Smith College senior thesis)

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000, edited by Karen V. Kukil)

Books for Young Readers
The Bed Book (1976)

The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996)

Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001)

Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.
In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.
Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.
He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.
W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.

Poetry
Poems (privately printed, 1928) Poems (1930) The Orators prose and verse (1932) Look, Stranger! in America: On This Island (1936) Spain (1937) Another Time (1940) The Double Man (1941) The Quest (1941) For the Time Being (1944) The Sea and the Mirror (1944) Collected Poetry (1945) The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947) Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (1950) Nones (1952) The Shield of Achilles (1955) Selected Poetry (1956) The Old Man's Road (1956) Homage to Clio (1960) About the House About the House (1965) Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966) Collected Longer Poems (1968) City without Walls (1969) Academic Graffiti (1971) Epistle to a Godson (1972) Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974) Selected Poems (1979) Collected Poems (1991)

Prose

Letters from Iceland (1937)

Journey to a War (1939)

Enchaféd Flood (1950)T

he Dyer's Hand (1962)

Selected Essays (1964)

Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Anthology

Selected Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf (1972)

Drama

Paid On Both Sides (1928)

The Dance of Death (1933)

The Dog Beneath the Skin: or, Where is Francis? (1935)

The Ascent of F.6 (1936)

On the Frontier (1938)

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both a writer and a doctor. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound became a great influence in Williams' writing, and in 1913 arranged for the London publication of Williams's second collection, The Tempers. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Following Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions. Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. His influence as a poet spread slowly during the twenties and thirties, overshadowed, he felt, by the immense popularity of Eliot's "The Waste Land"; however, his work received increasing attention in the 1950s and 1960s as younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, were impressed by the accessibility of his language and his openness as a mentor. His major works include Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), the five-volume epic Paterson (1963, 1992), and Imaginations (1970). Williams's health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey in 1963.

E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School. He received his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916, both from Harvard. His studies there introduced him to avant garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

In 1917, Cummings' first published poems appeared in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
I

n his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work towards further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
A Selected Bibliography

Poetry
Tulips and Chimneys (1923)& (1925)

XLI Poems (1925)

ViVa (1931)

No Thanks (1935)

Tom (1935)

1/20 (1936)

Fifty Poems (1941)

1 x 1 (1944)

Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems (1950)

Ninety-five Poems (1958)

73 Poems (1962)

Complete Poems (1991)

Prose
The Enormous Room (1922)

Eimi (1933)

Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, though he never earned a formal degree.
Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent.

In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work.
By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased.
Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost's early work as "the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world," and comments on Frost's career as The American Bard: "He became a national celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain."
About Frost, President John F. Kennedy said, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding."
Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.

Poetry

A Boy's Will (1913)North of Boston (1914)

Mountain Interval (1916)New Hampshire (1923)

West-Running Brook (1928)

The Lovely Shall Be Choosers (1929)

The Lone Striker (1933)

From Snow to Snow (1936)

A Further Range (1936)

A Witness Tree (1942)

Come In, and Other Poems (1943)

Masque of Reason (1945)

Steeple Bush (1947)

Hard Not to be King (1951)