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