FAMOUS AMERICAN POETS

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FAMOUS AMERICAN POETS

• A presentation for
• Student Support Services participants
• Troy University
• Troy, AL 36082

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WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES

• Provide students with a general overview of a few
  poets who have greatly influenced literary
  culture in the United States and internationally.
• Encourage students to develop an appreciation for
  poetry, literacy, creative writing and artistic
  voices.
• Encourage students to think critically about the
  various literary elements that poets apply.

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POETRY . . . What is it?

• Poetry is a type of literature that expresses
  ideas, feelings, or tells a story in a specific
  form (usually using lines and stanzas).
• Poetry can break from traditional forms and
  continue to be poetry with its infusion of
  literary elements.

Slide Source http//home.comcast.net/vldschool/
Poetry20Terminology.ppt256,2,POETRY
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POET

• A poet is a literary artist who uses words to
  create images or messages that evoke an
  emotional, intellectual or other critical
  thoughts and responses in readers.

Slide Source http//home.comcast.net/vldschool/
Poetry20Terminology.ppt256,2,POETRY
5
Shakespeare was brilliant, and . . .

• Many other poets are great and have contributed
  much to the literary and poetic arts.
• Consider American poets and their contributions
  to the poetic diaspora (the dispersion or
  population of poets in the world).
• Consider, too, that poets, though they may be
  well-known for their writings, are humans whose
  lives impacted their creative works.
• Consider how many great poets have been
  forgotten, despite their major contributions and
  genius.

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First, look at these influential American Poets
who have gotten limited recognition

• Sterling Allen Brown(1901-1989)
• Sterling Brown is one of the unsung heroes of
  African-American poetry. Born in 1901, died in
  1989, Brown spent most of his life as an English
  professor at Howard University, where he taught a
  wide range of courses from Shakespeare to World
  Literature.
• While generations of studentsAmiri Baraka and
  Gwendolyn Brooks being two of the most
  famoushave paid tribute to his influential
  teaching, his poetry was largely neglected during
  his lifetime.

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Sterling Brown Poem excerpt

• Riverbank Blues
• A man git his feet set in a sticky mudbank, A
  man git dis yellow water in his blood, No need
  for hopin', no need for doin', Muddy streams
  keep him fixed for good.
• Source www.poets.org http//www.afropoets.net/s
  terlingbrown3.html

Browns use of dialect and blues as a mantra for
expressing the reality of black life in the
United States.
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Paul Laurence Dunbar (another often forgotten
poet)

• Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
• Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first
  African-American to gain national eminence as a
  poet.
• Born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, he was the son of
  ex-slaves and classmate to Orville Wright of
  aviation fame as one of The Wright Brothers.
• He suffered depression and alcoholism after
  separation from his wife, yet he still published
  12 poetry books.
• He worked as an elevator operator and in several
  other job to pay off debts incurred from
  publishing his poetry.
• He died of complications of tuberculosis. It is
  believed his work in the Library of Congress with
  all of the dusty books contributed to his
  declining health.

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Paul Laurence Poem

• We Wear the Mask
•     WE wear the mask that grins and lies,     It
  hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,     This
  debt we pay to human guile     With torn and
  bleeding hearts we smile,     And mouth with
  myriad subtleties.
•     Why should the world be over-wise,     In
  counting all our tears and sighs?     Nay, let
  them only see us, while             We wear the
  mask.
•     We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries    
  To thee from tortured souls arise.     We sing,
  but oh the clay is vile     Beneath our feet,
  and long the mile     But let the world dream
  otherwise,             We wear the mask!

We Wear the Mask Lyrics of Lowly Life, in 1896
by Dodd, Mead, and Company. Source
http//www.potw.org/archive/potw8.html
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Relevance of Our Un-song Poets

• Dunbar exemplifies the stifled voice of many
  peoples and the frustrated voice of many
  writers/poets.
• Voices may be stifled because of differences
  political, racial, gender, economic, social,
  psychological, philosophical, emotional, etc.
• He represents the power of poetry to evoke
  feelings and teach people to apply a literary
  psychology in order to survive daily.

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FAMOUS AMERICAN POETS

• Despite their genius and fame, many poets were
  often misunderstood because of their unique
  dispositions and ideals.
• Sources for the following slides unless otherwise
  specified http//www.online-literature.com/dicki
  nson/ http//www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/
  a_f/eliot/eliot.htmhttp//www.biographyonline.net/
  poets/emily_dickinson.html poets.org
  http//www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng384/emilybio.htm

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FAMOUS POETS

• Emily Dickinson (1830 1886)

Images yahoo.com
13
Emily Dickinson Biography

• Born December 10, 1830 in Amherst, MA.
• Educated at Amherst Academy.
• At 17, began college at Mount Holyoke Female
  Seminary she became ill the spring of her first
  year and did not return.
• She would leave home only for short trips for the
  remainder of her life, leading scholars to
  speculate she may have been agoraphobic (fear of
  going in public or managing crowds).

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Was She Weird?

• Known for being a recluse, she didnt leave her
  familys homestead for any reason after the late
  1860s.
• She almost always wore white.
• She often lowered snacks and treats in baskets to
  neighborhood children from her window, careful
  never to let them see her face.

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Dickinsons Poetry Famous for . . .

• Regular meterhymn meter (musical) and ballad
  meter, also known as Common meter
• Quatrains (four line stanzas)
• Often 1st and 3rd lines rhyme, 2nd and 4th lines
  rhyme in iambic pentameter
• The use of dashes
• Thematic handling of nature and spiritual themes
  (life and death in particular)

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Dickinsons Publishing Career

• Sent poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a
  literary critic and family friend.
• He recognized her talent, but tried to improve
  them, which made Dickinson lose interest.
• At the time of her death, only seven of her poems
  had been published.

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Dickinsons poem
I heard a fly buzz when I died      The
stillness round my formWas like the stillness in
the air      Between the heaves of storm. The
eyes beside had wrung them dry,      And breaths
were gathering sureFor that last onset, when the
king      Be witnessed in his power. I willed
my keepsakes, signed away      What portion of
me ICould make assignable,- and then      There
interposed a fly, With blue, uncertain,
stumbling buzz,      Between the light and
meAnd then the windows failed, and then      I
could not see to see.
The death in this poem is painless, yet the
vision of death it presents is horrifying, even
gruesome. The appearance of an ordinary,
insignificant fly at the climax of a life at
first merely startles and disconcerts us. But by
the end of the poem, the fly has acquired
dreadful meaning. Clearly, the central image is
the fly. It makes a literal appearance in three
of the four stanzas and is what the speaker
experiences in dying. source
http//academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/c
s6/fly.html
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Dickinsons Legacy

• Dickinson died May 15, 1886, of nephritis (kidney
  disease).
• Dickinson is considered influential to poets such
  as Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, Archibald
  MacLeish, and William Stafford.
• Along with Walt Whitman, Dickinson is one of the
  two giants of American poetry of the 19th century.

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FAMOUS POETS

• Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
• Lived between time of the
• War of 1812 and The American Civil War.
• Gained prominence as a Free Verse poet

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Walt Whitman

• Born and raised in New York (Manhattan)
• His poetry broke every rule of traditional poetry
• Famous volume of poetry Leaves of Grass (1855)

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Walt Whitman

• Mixed reactions to his poetry, possibly because
  of its sensual references.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson/Abe Lincoln loved it.
• Whittier hated itthrew it in the fire
• Themes Whitman covered were Nature, Democracy,
  and Common Man.
• He introduced Free Verse to America
• Slide Source http//www.usd306.k12.ks.us/classro
  om/tanderson/Walt20Whitman.ppt258,3,Walt Whitman

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Whitmans Free Verse . . .

• Presented a series of images
• Used Other Literary Devices other than rhyme form
• Alliteration (repeated sounds at the beginning of
  words) Ex CELEBRATE myself, and sing
  myself
• Onomatopoeia (use of words that sound like their
  meaning) Ex buzz
• Repetition rhetorical device (repeating certain
  words or sounds for effect or emphasis)
• Imagery creating sensory details or pictures
  using specific and deliberate word choice

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Whitmans Song of Myself poem

• I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,And what I
  assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging
  to me as good belongs to you.
• I loafe and invite my soul,I lean and loafe at
  my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
• My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from
  this soil,     this air,Born here of parents
  born here from parents the same, and     their
  parents the same,I, now thirty-seven years old
  in perfect health begin,Hoping to cease not till
  death.

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What is Song of Myself About?

• Whitman reveals his desire to examine the
  individual, the communion between individuals,
  and the individual's place in the universe.
• The poem is a meditation on what it is to be
  human, as well as a song to the America that
  Whitman felt so passionately about, and a sermon
  about the equality of man.
• It is a long poem in which he makes mention of
  people in various occupations, people of
  different ethnicities, and the original energy
  (ability or potential to do work) that all
  individuals have in the universe.

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FAMOUS POETS

• Phyllis Wheatley (1753-1784)
• America's first published, black poet

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Wheatleys life

• Born in Senegal, Africa in 1753, she was sold
  into slavery at the age of seven to John and
  Susannah Wheatley of Boston.
• Although originally brought into the Wheatley
  household as a servant and attendant to
  Wheatley's wife, Phillis was soon accepted as a
  member of the family, and was raised with the
  Wheatley's other two children.
• Phillis' popularity as a poet both in the United
  States and England ultimately brought her freedom
  from slavery on October 18, 1773.   She even
  appeared before General Washington in March, 1776
  for her poetry and  was a strong supporter of
  independence during the Revolutionary War.
• She felt slavery to be the issue which separated
  whites from true heroism whites can not "hope to
  find/Divine acceptance with th' Almighty mind"
  when "they disgrace/And hold in bondage Afric's
  blameless race."

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Wheatleys Talent

• Phillis displayed her remarkable talents by
  learning to read and write English. At the age of
  twelve she was reading the Greek and Latin
  classics, and passages from the Bible. At
  thirteen she wrote her first poem.
• Phillis became a Boston sensation after she wrote
  a poem on the death of the evangelical preacher
  George Whitefield in 1770. Three years later,
  thirty-nine of her poems were published in London
  as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
  Moral. It was the first book to be published by a
  black American.
• Most of Phillis Wheatley's poems reflect her
  religious and classical New England upbringing.
  Writing in heroic couplets, many of her poems
  consist of elegies (mournful poems) while others
  stress the theme of Christian salvation.
• Although racial equality is not a theme to be
  found in Phillis Wheatley's poetry, one allusion
  of injustice appears in one of her most famous
  poems, On Being Brought From Africa To America.

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Wheatleys Poem

• On Being Brought From Africa To America
• 'Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,Taught
  my beknighted soul to understandThat there's a
  God, that there's a Savior tooOnce I redemption
  neither sought nor knew.Some view our sable race
  with scornful eye,"Their color is a diabolic
  dye."Remember Christians Negroes, black as
  Cain,May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
  
• ----Phillis Wheatley

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FAMOUS POETS

• T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

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T. S. (Thomas Stearn) Eliots Life

• T. S. Eliot . . .
• Being an introspective kind of person, as most
  poets are, Eliot underwent a profound religious
  transformation.  Eliot was confirmed as a member
  of the Anglican church in 1927.  This brought him
  a much more positive attitude towards life that
  can be seen in his writings after this date.
• It is rather difficult to find much information
  on T. S. Eliot, which is quite hard to
  understand, considering the profound impact he
  had on American and English literature. Eliot was
  a very private man and forbade in his will an
  official biography.
• Eliot died on  January 4, 1965. He was closely
  affiliated with Ezra Pound and James Joyce, who
  had very controversial writing careers.

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T. S. (Thomas Stearn) Eliots Life

• T. S. Eliot . . .
• Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888.
• Attended Harvard University, in addition to the
  best preparatory schools.
• He finished his bachelors degree in only three
  years.
• Eliot held many different kinds of jobs
  throughout his lifetime, as writing poetry was
  not and still is not the most lucrative of
  occupations when one is not well-known.  His
  occupations varied from schoolmaster, bank clerk,
  free-lance writer, assistant editor (of the
  Egoist), editor (of The Criterion), publisher
  (with Faber and Faber) and even professor of
  poetry at Harvard.

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T. S. (Thomas Stearn) Eliot

• Most famous works focused on human feelings of
  disillusionment and Alienation
• The Wasteland (His disillusionment with the
  economic and social state of the world in the
  1920s) -- He wrote this poem after suffering a
  serious writers block.
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• Loneliness and Alienation Prufrock is a
  pathetic man whose anxieties and obsessions have
  isolated him.    Indecision Prufrock resists
  making decisions for fear that their outcomes
  will turn out wrong.     Inadequacy Prufrock
  continually worries that he will make a fool of
  himself and that people will ridicule him for his
  clothes, his bald spot, and his overall physical
  appearance.    Pessimism Prufrock sees only the
  negative side of his own life and the lives of
  others.  
• Soruce http//www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poet
  s/a_f/eliot/life.htm

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From The Love Song of . . . Prufrock
The speaker realizes that time is passing and
that he is growing old. However, like other men
going through a middle-age crisis, he considers
changing his hairstyle and clothes. Like Odysseus
in the Homers Odyssey, he has heard the song of
the sirens. However, they are not singing to
him.   Source http//www.cummingsstudyguides.net
/Guides3/Prufrock.html 

• I have heard the mermaids singing, each to
  each.          I do not think that they will
  sing to me.              I have seen them
  riding seaward on the waves     Combing the
  white hair of the waves blown back     When the
  wind blows the water white and black.         
  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea    
  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and
  brown           Till human voices wake us, and
  we drown.

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FAMOUS POETS

• Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)
• The Poets Poet because of his belief in the
  superiority of poetry as an art form.

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Ezra Pound Biography

• Born in Hailey, Idaho, and raised in
  Philadelphia.
• Spent most of his career in self-imposed exile
  from America because he could not get published
  here as a young writer. (very controversial
  because of his political views and relentless
  commitment to free speech and support of new
  writers and theories.)
• Started the Imagist school and participated in
  the Vorticist Movement in Europe. Imagism a
  movement of American and English poets whose
  verse was characterized by concrete language and
  figures of speech, modern subject matter, freedom
  in the use of meter, and avoidance of mystical
  themes.
• Vorticism It was Pound who coined the name
  Vorticism, which was meant to connote vital,
  violent, rather mystical action (Encyclopedia of
  Art (New York Greystone Press, 1971), s.v.
  "Vorticism. / library.flawlesslogic.com.)
• Supported the publication of other controversial
  writers -- T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.
• Wrote Cantos, an experimental epic (long
  narrative poem) which he never finished, yet it
  is considered one of the most influential pieces
  of American literature. He worked on it 50
  years.
• Source http//www.bookrags.com/Ezra_Pound

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Ezra Pounds Biography (cont.)

• The Cantos records the poet's spiritual quest
  for transcendence, and his intellectual search
  for worldly wisdom and has been compared by many
  to Dantes Inferno.
• Credited with being the inventor of modern
  Chinese poetry because of his powerful
  translations of ancient Chinese writings.
• According to Katherine Anne Porter, "Pound was
  one of the most opinionated and unselfish men who
  ever lived, and he made friends and enemies
  everywhere by the simple exercise of the classic
  American constitutional right of free speech."
  (The Letters of E.P., 1907-1941, New York Times
  Book Reviwe, 29 Oct. 1950)

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Ezra Pound Poem excerpt

• At fourteen I married My Lord you.I never
  laughed, being bashful.Lowering my head, I
  looked at the wall.Called to, a thousand times,
  I neverlooked back.At fifteen I stopped
  scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled
  withyoursForever and forever and forever.Why
  should I climb the lookout?At sixteen you
  departed,You went into far Ku-to-en, by the
  riverof swirling eddies,And you have been gone
  five months.The monkeys make sorrowful noise
  overhead.

The River Merchants Wife A Letter (1915)
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Ezra Pounds Themes (some)

• That language can be translated clearly.
• That human experiences transcend time and
  culture. He translated Japanese and Chinese
  poetry into English.
• That free speech is for all.
• That language should be used purposely in order
  to achieve maximum meaning out of words.

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FAMOUS POETS

• Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967)

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Langston Hughes Biography

• James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902,
  in Joplin, Missouri. After his parents divorced
  and until his mother remarried, he lived with his
  grandmother. His father moved to Mexico.
• Hughes writing influences were Paul Lawrence
  Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman, though
  Huges if known for his insightful, colorful
  portrayals of black life in America from the
  twenties through the sixties. He was a major
  player in the Harlemn (New Negro Renaissance)
  Movement.
• Langston Hughes died of complications from
  prostate cancer in May 22, 1967, in New York.

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Hughes Poem

• What happens to a dream deferred?
• Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or
  fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it
  stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar
  over-- like a syrupy sweet?
• Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
• Or does it explode?

Dream Deferred
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Understanding Hughes What Happens to a Dream
Deferred? poem

• The questions are all rhetorical questions,
  because they intend to answer themselves.
• Each question in the first stanza uses simile
  like a raisin in the sun, like a sore,like
  rotten meat, like a syrupy sweet. The second
  stanza which is not a question but a suggestion
  also uses simile like a heavy load. The last
  stanza uses metaphor, does it explode?
• The poem employs rime sun-run, meat-sweet,
  load-explode.
• The poem also uses imagery raisin in the sun,
  fester like a sore / And then run, stink like
  rotten meat, etc.

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FAMOUS POETS

• Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 2000)

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Gwendolyn Brooks Biography

• Gwendolyn Brooks quickly rose to national
  prominence.
• Born in Topeka Kansas, but raised in Chicago, IL.
  Became Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968. She
  was married and had two children.
• In 1945 her first book of poetry, A Street in
  Bronzeville (published by Harper and Row),
  brought her instant critical acclaim.
• She was selected one of Mademoiselle magazine's
  "Ten Young Women of the Year," she won her first
  Guggenheim Fellowship, and she became a fellow of
  the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her
  second book of poems, Annie Allen (1949), won
  Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize.
• In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African
  American to win a Pulitzer Prize. From that time
  to the present, she has seen the recipient of a
  number of awards, fellowships, and honorary
  degrees usually designated as Doctor of Humane
  Letters.
• Her poetry moves from traditional forms including
  ballads, sonnets, variations of the Chaucerian
  and Spenserian stanzas as well as the rhythm of
  the blues to the most unrestricted free verse.
• Source http//www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poet
  s/a_f/brooks/life.htm

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Gwendolyn Brooks Poem

• We real cool.
• We Left school.
• We Lurk late.
• We Strike straight.
• We Sing sin.
• We Thin gin.
• We Jazz June.
• We Die soon.

THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL
WE REAL COOL
Link to web page and audio http//www.poets.org/v
iewmedia.php/prmMID/15433
46
FAMOUS POETS

• Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

Americas Most Celebrated Poet
47
Robert Frost Biography

• Though his work is principally associated with
  the life and landscape of New England, and
  usually very traditional in its forms, Frost
  gained universal prominence for his universal
  themes and modern use of language as it is
  actually spoken
• His poems are also deeply ironic and
  thought-provoking.
• He received the honor of four Pulitzer Prizes.
• Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in
  Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on
  January 29, 1963.
• Despite his success, he never earned a college
  degree.

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Robert Frosts Poem excerpt
The Road Not Taken (1915) Frost describes this
as his Tricky Poem -- Interpretation We can
not know how our choices will affect our future
until after we have made the choices and waited
to see their outcomes.

• I shall be telling this with a sigh
• Somewhere ages and ages hence
• Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
• I took the one less traveled by,
• And that has made all the difference.

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THE END

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