American Poets

Question 1

1885-1972, Mentor to TS Eliot and James Joyce
Imagist movement/modernist movement
“Poetry must be as well written as prose”
Pisan Cantos
Died in Venice
Mental institution
Middle name Loomis

Answer 1

Ezra Pound

Question 2

1932-1963 Suicide at 30 (head in oven)
Confessional poetry
“The Colossus” 
Victoria Lucas = pseudonym
“Ariel” posthumously released
“Stings”
The Bell Jar
Married to Ted Hughes (bloomsday) 
1982 Pulitzer for “Collected Poems”
Falcon Yard, Daddy, Crossing the Water

Answer 2

Sylvia Plath

Question 3

1920-1994
Born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Germany
“Laureate of American Lowlife” 
“Post Office”= debut novel at 50
Henry Chinaski=alter ego 
Movie: Barfly 
“Bluebird,” “The Laughing Heart,” “So You Want to be a Writer”

Answer 3

Charles Bukowski

Question 4

1894-1962, Edward Estin
lowercase, literary modernism 
“i carry your heart with me” 
The lost generation 
Buffalo Bills
“i: six non lectures” 
Typographical innovator 
Little lame balloon man

Answer 4

E.E. Cummings

Question 5

1902-1967 First name James
“Jazz Poetry” Harlem Renaissance
American Dream
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” “Harlem” “the Weary Blues” 
“I, too sing America”
“Dream Deferred” 
“Raisin in the Sun” 
Went to Columbia 
Poet Laureate of Harlem

Answer 5

Langston Hughes

Question 6

1928-2014 Marguerite Annie Johnson
2012 presidential medal of freedom
Read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Clinton’s inauguration
“I know why the caged bird sings” 1969 autobiography
Appeared in Roots
“Just give me a cool drink of water for I die”

Answer 6

Maya Angelou

Question 7

1819-1892 The Good Gray Poet
Father of Free Verse
Leaves of Grass
America’s first poet of democracy 
Poet Laureate of New York
“I hear America singing…”
“O Captain my Captain” about Lincoln
Song of Myself
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” 
O Pioneers
I sing the body electric 
Helped soldiers in Civil War
Beat Beat Drums

Answer 7

Walt Whitman

Question 8

1809-1849 Baltimore/Richmond
Dark romanticism/macabre 
The Raven
Invented word “detective” Auguste Dupin
Tintinnabulation (Bells)
Only novel: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Virginia Clemm (married his cousin)
Perhaps named for a King Lear character (parents were actors)

Answer 8

Edgar Allen Poe

Question 9

1874-1963 North of Boston (born in San Francisco)
Pulitzer Prize: New Hampshire: a poem with notes and grace notes
Read for JFK inauguration (The Gift Outright)
Fire and Ice
Good fences make good neighbors
Bennington: Final Resting Place
Nature, woods, environment, animals

Answer 9

Robert Frost

Question 10

1830-1886 born in Boston
Wrote lots of letters (she was a shut-in)
1,700 poems
Poems with numbers “poem no. 288”
Went to Mount Holyoke
Because I could not stop for death
I’m nobody! Who are you?
“Parting is all we know of Heaven, and all we know of hell”
“I felt a funeral, in my brain, and mourners to and fro”

Answer 10

Emily Dickinson

Question 11

1926-1997 went to Columbia, Paterson New Jersey
Friends with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac
“Beat Generation”
HOWL
Kaddish
Romantic, homosexuality, drug addictions, Buddhism, materialism and sensitivity of post WWII
“Flower Power”
Kill Your Darlings
“First party at Ken Kelsey’s with Hell’s Angels”

Answer 11

Allen Ginsberg