About the Poet Treasured for spare elegance, imagery, and precise language, Elizabeth Bishop revealed her thoughts to readers through regular poetry submissions to The New Yorker magazine. She was skilled at dreamy fantasy and detachment as well as solid description, and she filled her work with the places and emotional […]
Read more The Poets Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)The Poets Countee Cullen (1903-1946)
About the Poet Countee Louis Porter Cullen, a metrical genius and star of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote less out of racial consciousness than for the joy of poetic music. He profited from readings in the works of John Keats, A. E. Housman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. […]
Read more The Poets Countee Cullen (1903-1946)The Poets Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
About the Poet The master poet of the Harlem Renaissance and one of America’s most translated authors, James Mercer Langston Hughes captured the blues stanza and the dialect music of mainstream black America. The rare professional poet and playwright who earned a living from publication, at the height of the […]
Read more The Poets Langston Hughes (1902-1967)The Poets Sterling Brown (1901-1989)
About the Poet Immersed in the ballads and lore of African-Americans, Sterling Allen Brown devoted his life to surmounting black stereotypes. He was a master teacher as well as a master poet of the ballad, sonnet, free verse, and blues form in the years following the urban-centered Harlem Renaissance. Brown […]
Read more The Poets Sterling Brown (1901-1989)The Poets Allen Tate (1899-1979)
About the Poet A teacher, biographer, poet, and leader of the New Criticism movement, John Orley Allen Tate joined his peers at Vanderbilt University in defaming modernity and encroaching technology, which he feared compromised humanity. He was born on December 19, 1899, in Winchester, Kentucky, and he sparked wonder and […]
Read more The Poets Allen Tate (1899-1979)The Poets Hart Crane (1899-1933)
About the Poet An ecstatic, visionary jazz lover and verse talent eclipsed by self-induced angst and silenced by suicide, Harold Hart Crane is a literary enigma. His brief show of vitality raises conjecture about his true artistic promise, which flickered to extinction in the last months of his life. Obviously […]
Read more The Poets Hart Crane (1899-1933)The Poets Louise Bogan (1897-1970)
About the Poet Acclaimed as reviewer, autobiographer, and poet, Louise Bogan earned a place among the female voices of the mid-twentieth century. As a distinct loner living in a clannish New York circle, she produced an idiosyncratic style marked by epigram, dreamy landscapes, terse phrasing, and incisive images of sexual […]
Read more The Poets Louise Bogan (1897-1970)The Poets Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
About the Poet Virtuoso, mystic, and modernist author of the first mature work of the post-World War I Southern Renaissance, Nathan Eugene “Jean” Toomer was an alienated seeker, a forerunner of the racial neutrality of 1990s multiculturalism. A steadfast humanist, he was uncertain of his ethnic makeup yet identified solidly […]
Read more The Poets Jean Toomer (1894-1967)The Poets Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
About the Poet A precocious Jazz Age feminist, social rebel, and popular literary figure, Edna St. Vincent Millay is arguably America’s finest sonneteer. She earned a reputation for mastering verse drama and intricate, emotional poetry free of Victorian cant. With fluent, sensuous grace, she contained her passions in traditional poetic […]
Read more The Poets Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)The Poets John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)
About the Poet Poet John Crowe Ransom accepted the challenge of correlating empirical fact with the shadowy world of feeling. Grouped with Robert Penn Warren, Merrill Moore, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson as one of the original Fugitive Agrarians, an influential circle of Southern scholars, critics, and poets, he was […]
Read more The Poets John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)