American poet and essayist Goldbarth has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award—for Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (1991) and Saving Lives (2001)—the only poet to receive that honor two times. He received the Poetry Foundation Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry in 2008. A prolific writer, he has been described as one who can “see metaphor in almost any event” and as “a contemporary genius with… language.” Goldbarth is a fellow of both the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the Adele Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University, where he has taught for many years. The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems: 1972–2007 was published in 2007.
GREGER, DEBORA (1949–)
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Greger has published numerous poetry books, receiving grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. An artist working in collage as well as a poet, she recommended that her writing students look to the visual arts for ideas. Prior to her retirement, she was a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, and Cambridge, England, with her longtime partner and collaborator, the poet William Logan.
HAN YU (D. 824)
Han Yu was a Chinese poet, writer, and government official of the Tang dynasty whose significance in Asia is comparable to that of Dante or Shakespeare in the West. The end of his government service came as a result of his writings against the growing Buddhist influence in his country. In its place, he strongly supported Confucianism and developed a form of it that encompassed political action.
HARRISON, JEFFREY (1957–)
Harrison was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His poems are personal, often dealing with the ordinary. He attended Columbia University and now lives in Massachusetts. Speaking of his writing, he notes: “I like to have my desk up against a window so I can daydream… but I don’t have a routine, a special time to write.” About the poet’s role, he says: “Perhaps honesty is the prime responsibility—honesty about oneself and about what the world is like.” Into Daylight, published in 2014, is his most recent book of poetry.
HARRISON, JIM (1937–2016)
A prolific American poet, novelist, and essayist of the West, Harrison claimed that of all his writings, poetry meant the most to him. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and election into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two of his novellas were made into the movie Legends of the Fall (1994). His last book of poetry, Dead Man’s Float, was published shortly before his death.
HEANEY, SEAMUS (1939–2013)
Born in Northern Ireland, the first of nine children, Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth.” Both poet and playwright, he lived part-time in the United States from 1981 to 2006, when he taught at Harvard and was poet-in-residence as well. He also was a poetry professor at Oxford. His work was strongly influenced by his upbringing in Ireland, with its tension between the rural and the industrial and its troubled history. New and Selected Poems 1988–2013 came out in 2014. His Collected Poems, published in 2009, is a multi-volume CD set of Heaney reading all his published poems. Only the poems in his final book, Human Chain (2010), are not included. In the title poem of the book he writes: “A letting go which will not come again. / Or it will, once. And for all.”
HERBERT, ZBIGNIEW (1924–1998)
Herbert was a Polish poet, essayist, and moralist, and one of the best known and frequently translated post–World War II writers. His work has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. Trained as an economist, he became active in the Resistance during the war, and as a young man he published only a few of his poems in the underground press. After the war, he traveled widely, eventually returning to Warsaw, where he died. In 2013 the Polish government established the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award in honor of his legacy. His Collected Poems, 1956–1998, edited by Alissa Valles, was published in 2000.
HIRSHFIELD, JANE (1953–)
Hirshfield was born and raised in Manhattan and now lives in the San Francisco area. After graduating from Princeton, she studied at the Zen Center in San Francisco. About poetry she writes: “Poems carry shimmer, multiplicity, undertow, mystery, kites of meaning, and feeling so elusive they cannot be seen, yet they tauten the string that holds them.” Her poems, apparently simple on the surface, become more complex on further reading. She has taught at colleges and universities from California to Alaska. The Beauty was published in 2015.
HOAGLAND, TONY (1953–2018)
Born at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where his father was an army surgeon, Hoagland had a peripatetic childhood and adolescence, living in Ethiopia, Hawaii, and throughout the continental United States. Poetry provided him with an anchor. “It was the only thing that stayed constant in my life,” he said. He studied at Williams College and earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa; later he got an MFA from the University of Arizona. Sweet Ruin, his first poetry collection, was published in 1992. He went on to publish six more poetry books as well as a number of chapbooks and essay collections. He was a champion of accessible and humorous poetry, but also, as critic Dwight Garner wrote: “His erudite comic poems are backloaded with heartache and longing.” His last book, published in 2018, was Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God.
HOBERMAN, MARY ANN (1930–)
Hoberman, the former Children’s Poet Laureate (2008–2011), was born in Stamford, Connecticut. She graduated from Smith College and, thirty years later, received a master’s degree from Yale University. She is the critically acclaimed author of more than forty books for children, including A House Is a House for Me (1978), winner of a National Book Award. She also received the 2003 Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children given by the National Council of Teachers of English. One hundred of her favorite poems are collected in The Llama Who Had No Pajama (1998). Other popular titles include The Seven Silly Eaters (1997) and the New York Times bestselling series You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You. Her latest children’s book is The Sun Shines Everywhere (Little, Brown, 2019). She lives in Connecticut.
HOLLANDER, JOHN (1929–2013)
One of America’s foremost contemporary poets and literary critics, Hollander was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a MacArthur Fellow, and Poet Laureate of Connecticut. He taught at several universities, including Connecticut College, Hunter College, and Yale University, where he served as Sterling Professor of English. Hollander emphasized the importance of hearing poetry read out loud: “A good poem satisfies… informs you and entertains you.” Some of his poems were set to music by Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and others. A Draft of Light (2008) was his last volume of poetry.
HOPKINS, GERARD MANLEY (1844–1889)
Most poems written by Hopkins, one of the greatest Victorian poets, were not published during his lifetime. Born in Stratford, England, the eldest of nine children, he grew up in a well-to-do and accomplished Anglican family. He first wanted to be a painter but turned to the study of classics and writing poetry while attending Oxford. In 1866 he converted to Roman Catholicism. This act estranged him from his family and many of his friends. Torn between his Jesuit religious vows and his poetic talent, he gave up writing poems almost entirely for seven years, but eventually he came to the conclusion there was no conflict between the two pursuits. Hopkins’s importance as a poet centers on his unconventional uses of meter and rhythmic structure, drawing on the Anglo-Saxon tradition in English poetry as exemplified in Beowulf. He called his method “sprung rhythm.” A good introduction to his work is Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, published by Oxford University Press.
HUGHES, LANGSTON (1902–1967)
A leading American poet, novelist, playwright, and social activist, Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and moved to New York City after growing up in the Midwest. His father left the family soon after Hughes’s birth and moved to Mexico to escape
the pervasive racism in the United States. While his mother worked, Hughes was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, who passed on to him the black oral tradition and a sense of racial pride. In his autobiography he wrote: “I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.” Hughes’s literary production is enormous: more than fifty books of poetry, novels and short-story collections, plays, nonfiction books, and books for children. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes was published in 1994.
JAMES, CLIVE (1939–2019)
Born in Australia, James lived and worked in England since 1962. His father was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II and died in an airplane crash shortly after his release. James, an only child, was raised by his mother, a factory worker. After he immigrated to England, he worked briefly at various jobs before attending the University of Cambridge, where he studied English literature. He was a television, literary, and cultural critic for various periodicals, and his work was gathered in many collections. He also published four novels, five memoirs, six epics, and seven collections of poetry. The latest, Injury Time (2017), dealt with his illness. He passed away in 2019.
KNOTT, BILL (1940–2014)
Knott was a maverick whose poems were often self-published and whose first collection was published under a pseudonym, Saint Geraud, purportedly that of a poet who had committed suicide prior to publication. Knott was an orphan and worked on a farm in Michigan with his uncle. After serving in the army, he taught for many years at Emerson College in Boston. The Unsubscriber was published in 2004. I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems 1960–2014 was compiled by the poet Thomas Lux and came out in 2017.
KOOSER, TED (1939–)
A popular American poet and the thirteenth US Poet Laureate, Kooser was one of the first to be chosen for the honor from the Great Plains. In 2005 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Delights and Shadows. Before his retirement, Kooser was vice president of an insurance company, writing before work every morning. A professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Kooser lives in rural Nebraska. His most recent book is Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems (2018).
KUNITZ, STANLEY (1905–2006)
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Kunitz was the youngest of three children of Russian Jewish immigrants. Six weeks before he was born, his father committed suicide, and his mother raised the family alone. At fifteen he moved out of his home and became a butcher’s assistant. He graduated summa cum laude and earned an MA from Harvard. After serving in World War II as a conscientious objector, he taught at various colleges and universities, eventually becoming a professor of writing for eighteen years at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Kunitz was an avid gardener and for many years maintained a seaside garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His poetry, often very personal, uses flowers and other natural phenomena both descriptively and metaphorically. Kunitz was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his Selected Poems 1928–1958 and a National Book Award in 1995 for Passing Through. That he was still publishing poems one hundred years after his birth is evidence of his amazingly long writing career. The Collected Poems was published in 2000.
LARKIN, PHILIP (1922–1985)
A British poet and novelist, Larkin gained his undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford. For thirty years he worked as university librarian at the University of Hull while concurrently writing his poetry. Larkin also wrote two novels, criticism, essays, and jazz reviews. Although he published only four small volumes of poetry over his lifetime, he was extremely popular. In 1975 critic Alan Brownjohn wrote that Larkin produced “the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any English poet in the last twenty-five years.” The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) are his two last books of poetry, the latter containing one of his best-known poems, “This Be the Verse.” Philip Larkin: Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite, was published in 1988.
LAWRENCE, D. H. (1885–1930)
In his short life Lawrence wrote prolifically in many genres: novels, short stories, plays, essays, travel books, translations, literary criticism, and poetry. He was the youngest of four children, his father an uneducated miner, his mother a former teacher who had to perform factory work to help support the family. From an early age Lawrence escaped the tensions at home by roaming in the hilly open countryside, and the natural world was one of his primary concerns in all his writing. He earned a teaching certificate while working on his first poems and stories. Lawrence’s controversial opinions on human sexuality and the rigid conformity brought on by modern industrialization made him a pariah in England, and he left shortly after World War I to travel the world, returning to England only for brief visits. E. M. Forster, in an obituary, called him “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation,” and this evaluation has become widely accepted in the years since his death. Of Lawrence’s twelve novels, Sons and Lovers (1913) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) are among the best known. His poetry was gathered into the collection Complete Poems (Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren F. Roberts, editors) in 1994.
LEE, LI-YOUNG (1957–)
Lee is an American poet born in Indonesia to Chinese political exiles. The family arrived in the United States in 1964. Lee began writing poetry while attending the University of Pittsburgh. He has taught at various universities, including Northwestern University and the University of Iowa. Strongly influenced by classic Chinese poets, his writing has a distinct spiritual cast. His five books include Behind My Eyes (2008) and The Undressing (2018).
LE GUIN, URSULA K. (1929–2018)
Born in Berkeley, California, Le Guin came from an intellectual background. Both her parents were anthropologists; her mother was also the author of the well-known Ishi in Two Worlds, a biography of the last known member of the Yahi tribe. Although known primarily as a writer of science fiction and fantasy, Le Guin published numerous books of poetry; the last one, So Far So Good, came out just before she died. One critic, David Naiman, commented: “The through line of Le Guin’s career is how she attends to language, even in her prose, with the sensibility of a poet.” Her poems, unlike her fiction, deal with the world as we know it. Le Guin championed many causes, especially as concerned freedom of speech, environmentalism, and peace. Her many honors included dozens of awards for science fiction and fantasy and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation in 2014. No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters was published in 2017.
LERMAN, ELEANOR (1952–)
Lerman was born and grew up in New York City. At eighteen she struck out on her own and moved to Greenwich Village, where she found a job sweeping up in a harpsichord factory. This took place in what she describes as “the psychedelic days,” and she soon fell in with a group of artists who encouraged her as a poet. She submitted her first book, Armed Love, to Wesleyan University Press, and it was published in 1973 and nominated for a National Book Award. She was twenty-one. While the book was generally well reviewed, the poet X. J. Kennedy in the New York Times described it as “XX rated.” The resulting notoriety frightened her, and although she published another book shortly after, she eventually left New York, married, and gave up writing. After a twenty-five-year hiatus, she began to write poems again. Since then, she has published four more books of poetry, along with several novels and short-story collections. Her most recent book of poems is Strange Life (2014).
LEVERTOV, DENISE (1923–1997)
Although born and raised in England, Levertov is considered an American poet. Levertov’s mother was Welsh, and her father was a Russian Hasidic Jew who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. Growing up with suc
h a mixed heritage, Levertov always felt herself special: “[I knew] before I was ten that I was an artist-person and I had a destiny.” When she was twenty-four, she married the American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved to the United States. In 1955 she became a US citizen. Levertov published two dozen books of poetry as well as essays, letters, criticism, and translations. She was a committed feminist and very active politically during both the Vietnam and the Iraq wars. For much of her writing career she included political themes in her poetry, but eventually she concentrated on the religious and mystical concerns that had also preoccupied her throughout her life. Selected Poems was published in 2002.
LEWIS, JANET (1899–1998)
In the course of a century-long life, Lewis published her poetry, fiction, and opera librettos in almost every decade. Born in Chicago, she graduated from the University of Chicago and married the poet Yvor Winters in 1926. She began as an imagist poet grouped with William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. After she moved to Los Altos, California, where she lived until her death, she devoted most of her energy to raising her two children and providing a hospitable retreat for her husband’s admiring students. She taught at both Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems, quiet and well crafted, speak to the reader with integrity and depth. The last of her ten books of poetry, The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis, was published posthumously in 2000.
LOUIE, DIANE (1953–)
Louie was born in Newfoundland and grew up in Connecticut. She has degrees from Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (for both poetry and fiction), where she held a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Her book of prose poems, Fractal Shores, is a winner of the National Poetry Series. She currently lives in Paris, France, with her partner, a research scientist.
LYNCH, THOMAS (1948–)
Lynch is an American poet and essayist, as well as a professional undertaker who took over his father’s funeral home in Milford, Michigan, in 1974. An adjunct professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he received an American Book Award for his collection of essays The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (1997). He has published five books of poetry, his latest being The Sin-Eater: A Breviary.
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