About the Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, an American-born scholar, sophisticated eclectic, and poetic genius claimed by both the United States and England, is the twentieth century’s touchstone author and critic. His monumental verse, written during a period of emotional turmoil and personal re-evaluation, gave voice to the post-World War I […]
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About the Poet Marianne Craig Moore, a notable figure who liked to dress in a black tricorn hat and cape, became one of mid-twentieth-century America’s most recognized poets. Readers identified with her rigorous portrayal of ordinary themes, which included baseball, street scenes, common animals, and public issues, notably in “Carnegie […]
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About the Poet John Robinson Jeffers, a master of cadenced verse in short lyric and long narrative, stands out from his contemporaries for earnest craftsmanship and tragic, doomed battles between nature and technology. Amid the constant cycles of earth, sea, and sky, his harsh voice strove in vain for a […]
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About the Poet A critic, novelist, translator, mystic, and poet, Hilda Doolittle, familiarly known by the pen name H. D., overthrew traditional male domination of myth to voice the female perspective. She produced the “signet,” her term for an evocative, many-layered verse that influenced a generation of writers, including Allen […]
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About the Poet A technical genius and pivotal figure in world poetry, Ezra Loomis Pound was the iconoclast of his day. A restless seeker and experimenter, he disdained his American roots, kept a menage a trois with his wife and a mistress, and cultivated a bohemian image by dressing in […]
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About the Poet A much admired homebody whose verse captures humanistic truths, William Carlos Williams managed a forty-one-year career in medicine alongside a considerable contribution to modern literature. His background as a jazz disciple allied him with poets Hart Crane, Jean Toomer, Wallace Stevens, and e. e. cummings, all proponents […]
Read more The Poets William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)The Poets Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
About the Poet Wallace Stevens was the literary anomaly — the rather humdrum insurance company executive who, with the publication of a single volume, Harmonium, rose to dominance among American aesthetes, the seekers of beauty in art. Pervasive in his shimmering lines are a naturalism and awe that overstep the […]
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About the Poet Acclaimed America’s people’s poet, Carl August Sandburg spoke directly and compellingly of the worker, a vigorous, enduring composite character who embodied Sandburg’s free-verse portraits of democracy’s inhabitants. Some audiences were bowled over by Sandburg’s engagingly slangy phrasing and shadowy figures; the poet’s massive correspondence linked him to […]
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About the Poet Noted modernist and imagist Amy Lawrence Lowell was a consummate lecturer and conversationalist, as well as a joker and friend-maker among the great literary figures of her day. She enhanced her promotion of imagism as a viable alternative to traditional forms with the composition of over 600 […]
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About the Poet Robert Lee Frost, New England’s cherished poet, has been called America’s purest classical lyricist and one of the outstanding poets of the twentieth century. Although he is forever linked to the stone-pocked hills and woods of New England, he was born in San Francisco, California, on March […]
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