Famous People - Poets Flashcards
Angelou, Maya (Marguerite Johnson)
b. St. Louis, MO, 1928
d. 2014
Poet and Author
Honored throughout her long and prolific career for her poetry, autobiographical work, and contributions to the chronicling of the African-American experience. In her early life, also worked as an actor and dancer, traveling throughout Europe and living for a time in Egypt and Ghana, where she worked on African Review. Her memoir details the racial oppression and violence of her childhood in rural Arkansas.
Works:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)
The Heart of a Woman (1981)
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986)
Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh)
b. York, England, 1907
d. 1973
English-American Poet
In his early career, he was one of a group of English poets dedicated to new techniques and leftist politics. he attacked his country’s social and economic system before settling in New York, where he wrote his famous ruminative poem on the outbreak of WW II, “September 1st, 1939.” He was a poet of versatile style, simple yet haunting diction, and a range of themes from love to art to politics; his sensibility combined modern psychological insight and homosexual orientation with Catholic faith. Other noted poems are:
Spain 1937;
Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love;
Musee des Beaux Arts;
In Memory of W.B. Yeats
Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones)
b. Newark, N.J., 1934
Poet and Playwright
He rose to prominence in the 1960’s with his collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), and his play Dutchman (1964). His early work focused on African-American rage and racial oppression, and on black nationalism. He went on to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem in 1965. He has published prolifically, counting among his works several volumes of poetry, plays, collections of essays, and short stories.
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre
b. Paris, 1821
d. 1867
Poet and Critic
He published only one book of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), which appeared in 1857 and was expanded in 1861 and 1868. Its bold, sensuous contents introduced French symbolism and defined the beginning of modernism in French poetry. In it he developed a theory of “correspondences” among the senses, and as its title suggests, explored beauty’s evanescence and closeness to decay and evil. Six of its poems were banned as obscene. His life was troubled by spiritual, physical and financial turmoil, and he was an important critic of art and literature. A volume of his prose poems was published posthumously.
Blake, William
b. London, 1757
d. 1827
Poet and Artist.
A romantic who preceded the Romantic era, was trained as an engraver, and all of his books after Poetical Sketches (1783) were composites of art and poetry. His early lyrics, Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), are beloved for their simple direction and rhythms and haunting images; but his later long, symbolic, prophetic poems can be difficult reading. He was a visionary who developed his own mythical system. He is seen as both a political revolutionary and religious mystic. His prophetic poems include:
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793);
America (1793);
The Book of Urizon (1794);
Jerusalem (1804-20).
Boccaccio, Giovanni
b. Paris, 1313.
d. 1375.
Italian Writer.
Born illegitimately, he spent his youth in Florence and Naples and became a writer against his merchant father’s wishes. His early works were Il Filocolo (ca. 1336-38), a prose romance; the narrative poem Il Filostrato (ca. 1338-40), based on the Troilus and Cressida legend, and an epic, Teseida (1341). His grand achievement was the Decameron (1348-53), a volume of prose tales, both tragic and comic, some bawdy, taking place during the Black Death. This panoramic treatment of bourgeois life is one of the first and greatest works of Italian humanism and helped usher in vernacular Italian as a literary language.
Bradstreet, Anne
b. Northampton, England, ca. 1612.
d. 1672.
Poet.
She was born into a Puritan family and moved to the Massachusetts colony when she was eighteen. She wrote poems that focus on domestic and spiritual matters and became one of the first English poets to write in America. Her verse was written for her family, and her first volume, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) was published in England without her knowledge. Her sequence Contemplations, considered today the finest example of her work, was not published until the mid-19th century.
Breton, Andre
b. Tinchebray, France, 1896.
d. 1966.
Poet, Essayist, Critic, and Editor.
One of the leaders of the Surrealist movement, and a participant in Dada, its predecessor. A onetime medical student, he was interested in mental illness and was influenced by Freud’s ideas about the unconscious. With Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault he founded the journal Litterature which promoted the technique of automatic writing. His best-known works include Manifeste du surrealism (1924), the novel Nadja (1928), and Poemes (1948).
Brooks, Gwendolyn
b. Topeka, Kan., 1917
d. 2000
Poet.
The first African-American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize (Annie Allen, 1949), her work, often narrative in nature, addressed the everyday lives of urban blacks. Among her many collections are The Bean Eaters (1960), In the Mecca (1968), and Children Coming Home (1991). In addition to her collections of poetry, she published novels (Maud Martha, 1953), memoirs, and children’s books. In 1989 she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
b. Durham, England, 1806.
d. 1861.
Poet.
“My Little Portuguese.” Chiefly known for her collection Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), which chronicles her love affair with her husband, she began publishing in 1838 (Seraphim and Other Poems). Although ill and a recluse for much of her early life, she quickly became well known in literary circles. After their marriage, she and her husband moved to Italy, where she spent the rest of her life.
Browning, Robert
b. Camberwell, England, 1812.
d. 1889.
Poet.
Once a less-known poet than his wife, he is now recognized as one of the greatest Victorian poets. He failed as a dramatist but mastered the dramatic monologue to express powerful irony and psychological insight in poems such as “My Last Ducchess,” “Andrea del Sarto,” and “Fra Lippo Lippi.” His often colloquial and discordant style affected later poets. Other important poems are Pippa Passes (1841), “Love Among the Ruins” (1852), and the long, great narrative, The Ring and the Book (1868-69).
Bryant, William Cullen
b. Cummington, Mass., 1794.
d. 1878.
American poet and journalist.
He wrote the first draft of his best-known poem, “Thanatopsis,” when he was 16 and published Poems, his widely praised collected work, when he was 27. Moving to New York in 1825 to work in journalism, he became editor in chief and part owner of the New York Evening Post in 1829. His paper was an ardent champion of free speech, workers’ rights, free trade, and the abolition of slavery, and he helped organize the Republican Party.
Burns, Robert
b. Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland, 1759.
d. 1796.
Poet.
“The Bard of Ayrshire.” Regarded as Scotland’s national poet, he is the best-known writer of poetic songs in English. A farmer much of his life, he wrote mostly in the Scots-English dialect—a fresh infusion of colloquial verse into a neo classical age. A scandalous womanizer, he produced illegitimate children and famous love poems, first published in 1786 in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, and continuing with such compositions as “Afton Water” (1789) and “A Red, Red Rose” (1796). He is best known for another song, “Auld Lang Syne,” but he also wrote excellent satires and the well-regarded narrative “Tam o’ Shanter.”
Byron, George Gordon (Lord)
b. London, 1788
d. 1824.
Poet.
Clubfooted but legendarily handsome, he had affairs with perhaps 200 women, including his halfsister, and several men. His notoriety led to exile in Switzerland and Italy. His great poetic gift was for narrative and satire, written with mastery of English verse forms. The first two cantos of Childe Harold (1812) made him famous, and subsequent poems introduced the “Byronic hero,” the individualistic, iconoclastic immoralist who reappears definitively in his tragedy Manfred (1817). His greatest poem, Don Juan, a comic, epic satire written 1819-24, was his last. He died in Greece while training troops for that country’s war of independence.
Catullus
b. Verona, Italy, ?84 B.C.
d. ?54 B.C.
Roman lyric poet.
A contemporary of Caesar, Cicero, and Pompey, he is considered one of the finest lyric poets. He arrived in Rome around 62 B.C. and established himself as an aristocrat and prominent figure. His poems, 116 of which survive, were often short, sometimes satirical, and always skillful. His most famous works are passionate poems addressing Lesbia, the pseudonym for his mistress, probably Clodia, the sister of a well-known Roman statesman.
Cervantes (Saavedra), Miguel de
b. Alcala de Henares, Spain, 1547.
d. 1616.
Novelist, poet, playwright.
He was wounded at the battle of Lepanto in 1571, enslaved by Barbary pirates, impoverished, and briefly imprisoned. He took up writing poetry, stories, and plays, and in 1605 he produced the first part of the most internationally popular work of Spanish literature, Don Quixote (Part II, 1615), a long burlesque of chivalric romance, featuring an aging, gaunt, self-proclaimed knight who sets out, in the company of his round, earthy squire, on a series adventures to impose his idealism on Spanish society. It has often been called the world’s first novel. He continued to publish—stories, stage-pieces, and a romance—until his death.
Chaucer, Geoffrey
b. London, ca. 1343.
d.1400.
Narrative poet.
The first great, and greatest medieval, English poet, spent most of his life around the English court in government service. Being both commoner and aristocrat, he understood people of every station. After he completed an elegy, The Book of the Duchess, in 1370, diplomatic travels to Italy acquainted him with the writing of Boccaccio, which influenced his greatest works, Troilus and Criseide, (ca. 1385) and The Canterbury Tales begun about 1386 and never completed.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
b. Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England, 1772.
d. 1834.
Poet and essayist.
After his impulsive, dreamy, scholarly youth, his poetic career took shape when he and William Wordsworth collaborated on Lyrical Ballads (1798), which initiated what we call English Romanticism. The collection contained his most famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, whose mysterious, supernatural qualities also flavored his “Kubla Khan” and Christabel, both written early but published in 1816. He also excelled in writing more sober, meditative poems such as “Frost at Midnight” (1798) and “Dejection: An Ode” (1802). His output was constricted by physical suffering and opium addiction. Later philosophical writings and very important literary criticism were collected in Biographia Literaria (1817).
cummings, e. e. (Edward Estlin)
b. Cambridge, Mass., 1894.
d. 1962.
Poet.
One of the most popular American poets of his time, he is best recognized for the idiosyncratic shaping of his verse and his elimination of uppercase letters, even in his own name, In 15 volumes he wrote, often with humor, sometimes in poems without beginnings or ends, or with quirky phrasing (“pity this monster, manunkind,” “all ignorance toboggans into know”) of joy and sadness, of love, and (rather explicitly) of sex. He was also an accomplished painter and wrote a successful memoir of his imprisonment during World War I, The Enormous Room (1922).
Dante Alighieri
b. Florence, 1265.
d. 1321.
Poet.
The greatest Italian poet, he was a nobleman intimately involved in the tumultuous politics of Florence. After the death of his beloved Beatrice, he celebrated her, and ideal love, in The New Life (1292). In 1302 he was banished from Florence; afterward, it is believed, he composed The Divine Comedy, one of the greatest works of world literature. Intricately rhymed in the Tuscan dialect, it is a three-book account of the poet’s tour, guided by Virgil and Beatrice, of hell, purgatory, and paradise—a vivid, symbolic, meditative investigation of a medieval Christian’s understanding of God.
Dickinson, Emily
b. Amherst, Mass. 1830.
d. 1886.
Poet.
Daughter of a onetime congressman, she seems to have lived a normal life until her late twenties, when she began to withdraw into a lifelong reclusiveness in her Amherst home. There she developed into one of the greatest and most influential American poets, unrecognized until, after her death, her sister discovered more than 1,500 of her poems. These poems, plain in diction but original in imagery, meter, and their irregular rhyming, revealed a quietly passionate woman sensitive to nature, in love with an unnamed man, and troubled by the specter of death and uncertainty about faith and immortality.
Donne, John
b. London, 1572.
d. 1631.
Poet.
The first “metaphysical” poet, he introduced a new poetic style-witty, colloquial, almost perverse in its leaps of thought and imagery—that strongly influenced poets of the 20th century. He left the Catholic Church, joined military expeditions, became a courtier, and pursued ladies; then in 1615 he became an Anglican priest. He is at once a great poet of physical love (“The Ecstasy,” “The Canonization”) and religious devotion. Keenly conscious of death, he composed several elegies, as well as satires and celebrated prose sermons. Nearly all of his poetry was published posthumously.
Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns)
b. St. Louis, 1888
d. 1965.
American-English poet, dramatist, and critic.
“Old Possum.” He moved permanently to England in 1914 and soon published an entirely new kind of poetry for the 20th century, beginning with the ironic, anxiously edged, unevenlined monologue, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915. With The Waste Land (1922), a long, allusive, diverse poem, he established himself as a great poet who had found the voice and prosody to capture the barren and broken condition of Western civilization after World War I. He later expressed Christian faith in poems such as “Ash Wednesday” (1930) and the Four Quartets (1943). He was a particularly astute critic of Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and drama. After his historical drama, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), he wrote plays with contemporary settings, including The Cocktail Party (1950).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
b. Boston, 1803
d. 1882
Poet and essayist.
He, like his father, was a Unitarian minister, but his unorthodox views led to an early end to his clerical career and ostracism by Harvard Divinity School. He took up a literary (and lecturing) career and expressed, beginning with the essay “Nature” in 1836, a philosophy to be known as “Transcendentalism” that became an important literary movement. It held that God was immanent in man and nature, and emphasized individual freedom. His lecture “American Scholar” (1837) was a historic call for cultural independence from Europe. Essays (1840) contained the famous “Self-Reliance”; his other books include Representative Men (1850) and The Conduct of Life (1860). Noted poems are “The Rhodora” (1834), “Concord Hymn” (1837), and “Threnody” (1846).
Frost, Robert Lee
b. San Francisco, 1874
d. 1963.
Poet.
“The Voice of New England.” He moved to Lawrence, Mass., at age 10, and is considered the quintessential 20th-century New England poet. After withdrawing from Harvard, he lived meanly as a New Hampshire farmer, then moved to England and published his first books of poetry, A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914). Their success brought him back home, where he became America’s most famous poet. His use of traditional verse patterns, colloquial diction, and natural settings in lyrical poems like “Mending Wall,” “After Apple Picking” (both 1914), and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923), make them appealing, yet closer reading reveals inklings of mystery and danger. Important narrative poems include “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial” (both 1914), and “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (1936). His style was consistent throughout many volumes of poems, for which he won four Pulitzer Prizes.
Ginsberg, Allen
b. Newark, NJ, 1926
d. 1997
Poet.
A member of the Beat movement and one of the most famous American poets of the late 20th century, he rose to prominence in the 1950’s with the publication of his epic poem Howl (1956). Deeply influenced by Buddhism, his poems show a concern with ordinary language and natural speech patterns. Among his collections are Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), and The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971 (1972), which won the National Book Award.
Heaney, Seamus
b. Deny, Ireland,1939
Poet.
A Nobel laureate in 1995, he is regarded as the finest Irish poet since Yeats. His early books of poetry, Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969) and Wintering Out (1972), focused on rural Ireland, but with North (1975) he began to address his country’s political and religious “troubles.” In Station Island (1984), he incorporates his own experience as an Ulster native into his country’s bitter history. Technically brilliant, musical, and poignant, his poetic volumes include Field Work (1979), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1993), The Spirit Level (1996), and a translation of Beowulf (2000).
Heine, Heinrich
b. Dusseldorf, Prussia, 1797
d. 1856
Poet.
The best-known poet of Germany’s Romantic movement, he was born into a Jewish family but later reluctantly converted to Protestantism. He rose to prominence in 1827 with the publication of The Book of Songs (1827), a series of poems, often set to music, that explore the schism between the artistic sensibility and reality. His late collection, Romanzero (1850), contains some of his most powerful work.
