American Literature: American Poets

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Most readers of E.E. Cummings’ work would agree that Cummings’ use of language is at the very least problematic. His attempt to democratize language by abandoning strict adherence to the accepted rules of punctuation and capitalization is just one of his many idiosyncrasies. MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
William Carlos Williams' long, late poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” is remarkable in several regards. It is the fullest example of his work in the variable foot and in the triadic (or three-foot, stepped-down) line, a breakthrough form he discovered and utilized for many of his poems from the 1950s. MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
The last six months of Sylvia Plath's life produced much of the work for which she is now known. Plath wrote “Daddy” in October 1962, about five months before her suicide in February 1963. MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Diving into the Wreck (1973), Adrienne Rich's seventh collection, explores her growing opposition to the patriarchal order influencing her identity as a woman and a poet. MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
While Life Studies (1959) is widely regarded as Robert Lowell's true arrival, “For the Union Dead” is perhaps the most well-known and widely anthologized of his poems. MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), “Howl” (including “Footnote to Howl”) marks the high point of Beat Generation literary achievement and is arguably the best-known American poem published. MORE

from Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Elizabeth Bishop's much-anthologized poem “One Art” is a villanelle. MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Critics (but not readers) avoided Robinson Jeffers’ poetry in the mid-20th century, especially formalists such as the New Critics, because of its content as well as its form. Jeffers is primarily a nature poet. MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Hart Crane's second book, a 1,200-line poem begun in 1923, published in 1929 in Paris and in America in 1930, The Bridge is the. major production of his career as well as one of the most misunderstood poems of the 20th century. It presents Crane's “myth of America,” his answer to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
“The Kingfishers” is generally regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century for its influence on nearly every experimental tradition in postwar American poetry. MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
In 1912 Robert Frost gave up his secure teaching post at the State Normal School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and traveled with his wife and children to England. “The Road Not Taken” has often been interpreted as expressing his risky decision to leave America for an uncertain future in a country where he could write poetry in peaceful poverty. MO

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
The most representative, if not the greatest, poem of the 20th century is, outside Ezra Pound's Cantos, perhaps also the most difficult. MORE

Poems, autobiographies, plays; news editor. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Maya Angelou is a prolific autobiographer, poet, and writer. MORE

English-born US poet. He wrote some of his most original poetry, such as Look, Stranger! (1936), in the 1930s when he led the influential left-wing literary group that included the writers Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis. MORE

From Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Lucille Clifton, former poet laureate of Maryland, writes strikingly simple, unrhymed, epigrammatic poetry about her life, her family, and the lives of African-Americans. MORE

1830–86, American poet, b. Amherst, Mass. She is widely considered one of the greatest poets in American literature. MORE

American-born British critic and writer whose poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and The Waste Land (1922) established him as a major literary figure. MORE

1874–1963, American poet, b. San Francisco. Perhaps the most popular and beloved of 20th-century American poets. MORE

Poet, writer, playwright, and librettist, born in Joplin, Missouri, USA. MORE

One of the outstanding poets of her generation, Sylvia Plath became a heroine to many feminist readers with her intense and harrowing work. She was married to Ted Hughes, the future poet laureate, who edited her Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems after her suicide. MORE

Poet and writer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. MORE

1885–1972, American poet, critic, and translator, b. Hailey, Idaho, grad. Hamilton College, 1905, M.A. Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1906. MORE

American poet and essayist whose works, notably Diving Into the Wreck (1973), concern radical feminism, lesbianism, and political activism. MORE

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
American poet, b. Saginaw, Mich., educated at the Univ. of Michigan and Harvard. A poet of the Midwest, Roethke combined a love of the land with his vision of the development of the individual. MORE

American poet whose works, including the collections Live or Die (1966) and The Death Notebooks (1974), document her struggle with mental illness and her search for faith. MORE

American poet whose artful and innovative works, including “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Sunday Morning” (both 1923), concern the role of imagination in bringing order to a chaotic world. MORE

American poet, b. West Hills, N.Y. Considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets, Walt Whitman celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual and sang the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man. MORE