Coming to Age

by Carolyn Hopley

  MACLEISH, ARCHIBALD (1892–1982)

  MacLeish, writer and statesman, was born in Glencoe, Illinois, and attended Yale University, writing for college magazines and winning the university’s Prize Poem award in 1915. He served in France in World War I and published his first poetry collection, Tower of Ivory, in 1917. He then attended Harvard Law School. But after a few years he relinquished his legal career to move to Paris with his young family and write poetry. Returning to the United States, he was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Librarian of Congress, the first of the many governmental posts he occupied until the end of World War II. He returned to academia in 1949 as a professor at Harvard University. Toggling between writing and public service throughout his long life, he left a lasting legacy in both areas. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry and one for his play J.B. His New and Collected Poems 1917–1976 was published in 1976.

  MAJ, BRONISLAW (1953–)

  Maj is a major Polish poet, critic, translator, and essayist currently living in Kraków. He received his PhD in the humanities from the Jagiellonian University and published his first book of poetry in 1980. He currently teaches Polish literature at the Jagiellonian University. As yet none of his books have been translated into English.

  MEREDITH, WILLIAM (1919–2007)

  Born in New York City, Meredith began to write poetry in college. His first book, Love Letters from an Impossible Land, published when he was twenty-five, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. He served as a US Army Air Force pilot in both World War II and the Korean War. He taught at the college level for many years, eventually becoming a professor of English at Connecticut College. In 1983 he suffered a stroke, which caused expressive aphasia, affecting his ability to speak. Unable to teach or write poetry, he ended his teaching career. After years of extensive rehabilitation he began composing poems again, while continuing his avocation of arborist on his Connecticut farm. The recipient of many honors and awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, he also was US Poet Laureate. Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems won the 1997 National Book Award for Poetry.

  MERWIN, W. S. (1927–2019)

  Merwin was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. After attending Princeton University, he moved to Spain, at one point serving as tutor to the poet Robert Graves’s son. In 1952 W. H. Auden chose Merwin’s first book, A Mask for Janus, as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. Merwin was also a playwright, translator, and editor. Over the years his poetry became less formal and controlled, its subject matter more spiritual and devoted to the natural world. Merwin was a practicing Buddhist, and in 1976 he moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen master Robert Aitken. In 2010 he and his wife co-founded the nonprofit Merwin Conservancy on the island of Maui to preserve their home and property, which contains one of the largest collections of rare palm trees in the world. Merwin received many honors, including a National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems (2005) and two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Carrier of Ladders (1970) and The Shadow of Sirius (2008).

  MILLAY, EDNA ST. VINCENT (1892–1950)

  The third woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1923), Millay was one of the most popular and respected poets in the United States for much of her career. The subjects of her always progressive writing ranged from the political to the personal (and strongly feminist). She was also a gifted writer of sonnets and a poetic playwright: Aria da capo is her most experimental play. In A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), her mocking sense of humor makes its appearance: “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—/ It gives a lovely light!” The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Modern Library Classics edition) was published in 2002.

  MILOSZ, CZESLAW (1911–2004)

  Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, Milosz is considered one of the twentieth century’s major poets, both in his native Poland and in the world. A prolific writer in many genres, he was also an important political figure in Poland after World War II. His anti-Stalinist views eventually led him to defect to the West, first to Paris and then to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1979. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He was fluent in many languages and translated much of his own poetry into English, often working with his colleague the American poet Robert Hass. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he lived part-time in Kraków. The critic Terrence Des Pres commented: “Milosz deals in his poetry with the central issues of our time: the impact of history upon moral being, the search for ways to survive spiritual ruin in a ruined world.” New and Collected Poems 1931–2001 was published in 2001 and reprinted in paperback in 2017.

  MOORE, MARIANNE (1887–1972)

  Moore was born in Missouri and grew up in Pennsylvania. Her parents separated before she was born, and Moore never met her father. Moore graduated from Bryn Mawr College, where she wrote poetry for the college’s literary magazines. After studying at a commercial college, she and her mother moved to New York City in 1918. She started working at the New York Public Library in 1921. At that time she was part of the imagist group of poets, and her first book, Poems, was published in London without her permission. In regard to her poetic style, she wrote of her preference for “the unaccented rhyme, the movement of the poem musically is more important than the conventional look of lines upon the page.” She would place exact rhymes within rather than at the ends of her lines and varied the shape of her stanzas according to the poem. In 1952 Moore’s Collected Poems won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and prior to that, in 1951, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. By then Moore had become a quasi-celebrity, speaking at colleges across the country, a striking figure in her tricorn hat and black cape. She was a great baseball fan and threw out the opening pitch at Yankee Stadium in 1968. Her Complete Poems was reissued in 1994.

  MORLEY, HILDA (1916–1998)

  Born in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants, Morley was a precocious child, sending poems to W. B. Yeats, who encouraged her in her writing. At fifteen she moved to Haifa, Palestine, with her mother; later she studied at the University of London. When the bombing of London began, she returned to the United States and married painter Eugene Morley. Through him she met many of the New York abstract expressionists, whose art had a major influence on her poems. The couple divorced a few years later, and in 1952 she married the German composer Stefan Wolpe. They both taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Morley did not publish her first book, A Blessing Outside Us, until 1976, when she was sixty. For many years before that, she had been the primary caretaker of her husband, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 1972. Morley had been praised by many of her contemporaries for her skill and insight; they regretted that her work had not found a wider audience. The poet Hayden Carruth wrote of one of her poems: “How simple the language is, not a rhetorical gesture, not an unnecessary adjective, yet heightened by interweaving lines, cadences, and tones, by urgency of feeling and fineness of perception.” Morley published six collections, the last of which was The Turning (1998).

  NASH, OGDEN (1902–1971)

  Ogden Nash is a national treasure

  Who has given his readers much pleasure.

  Though his rhythms are often erratic

  And his rhyming at times problematic,

  Every line of his verse,

  Be it prolix or terse,

  Has elicited joy without measure

  (And it earned him a nice wad of cash).

  So three cheers for our great Ogden Nash!

  NORRIS, GUNILLA (1939–)

  Norris is the author of two books of poetry: Learning from the Angel and Joy Is the Thinnest Layer. The latter won the Nautilus gold medal for the best book of poetry in 2017. She is also the author of eleven books on the spirituality of the everyday. The most recent is Great Love in Little Ways: Reflections on the Power of Kindness (20
19). A mother and grandmother, Norris has been a psychotherapist in private practice for more than forty-five years and has felt privileged to accompany many people on their journeys to growth, healing, and spiritual connectedness.

  OSTRIKER, ALICIA (1937–)

  Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ostriker is a poet, critic, teacher, and outspoken feminist. A writer since childhood, she did her doctoral dissertation on the work of William Blake. She has taught at Rutgers University since 1972 and is now professor emerita of English. Her poetry and criticism deal with social justice, her Jewish feminist identity, and personal growth. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976–77), the Rockefeller Foundation (1982), and the Guggenheim Foundation (1984–85). The Crack in Everything (1996) was a National Book Award finalist. Her most recent book is Waiting for the Light (2017).

  PADGETT, RON (1942–)

  Padgett is a poet, editor, and translator as well as a fiction writer and memoirist. He has also collaborated with various artists in works in the surrealist and dadaist traditions. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he co-founded a literary review while he was still in high school. After graduating from Columbia University in 1960, a Fulbright award enabled him to spend a year in Paris studying French poetry. He has taught at and directed the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and been publications director at the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, both in New York City. How Long was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2011, and Collected Poems won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2013.

  PALEY, GRACE (1922–2007)

  While known primarily for her short stories and political activism, Paley published three volumes of poetry, beginning in her sixties. Born in New York City, she was the daughter of immigrants from Ukraine. She attended Hunter College and The New School, taught at Sarah Lawrence College, and was a co-founder of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York. As an antinuclear pacifist, she demonstrated against the Vietnam War and in 1978 was part of a peace mission to Hanoi, trying to gain the release of prisoners of war. Her poems are direct and honest, informed by her warmth and humor, her love of family, and her deep human understanding. Among other honors, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction in 1961. Her Begin Again: Collected Poems was published in 2000.

  PASTAN, LINDA (1932–)

  Born and raised in New York City, Pastan has lived since then in Maryland, where she served as Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1995. She won the Mademoiselle poetry prize while attending Radcliffe College (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Her poetry deals in a deceptively simple way with profound themes, both domestic and existential. She taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for twenty years. Her honors include the Dylan Thomas Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2003. Of her recent book Insomnia (2015), she says she chose the title “because the word conjures for me a struggle with consciousness itself as well as a struggle with the looming dark, just outside the window” (Paris Review interview, January 6, 2006).

  PEACOCK, MOLLY (1947–)

  Poet, essayist, and biographer, Peacock was born in Buffalo, New York. She graduated from Harpur College (Binghamton University) and earned an MA from Johns Hopkins University. A former president of the Poetry Society of America, she inaugurated the Poetry in Motion program, which displays poems on New York City’s subways and buses. She has taught at many universities and has published seven books of poetry. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, she now lives in Toronto. She has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Her latest book is Analyst (2017).

  PLUTZIK, HYAM (1911–1962)

  Plutzik was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in rural Connecticut. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he did not learn English until he was seven, when he began school in a one-room schoolhouse. A graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he later studied at Yale, where he twice won the university’s Cook prize for the best unpublished poem. After serving in the army during World War II, he became a professor at the University of Rochester for the rest of his career. Summing up his feelings about poetry, he wrote in an autobiographical essay: “I once looked at poetry as little more than beautiful language. Later, it was a way of communicating the nuances of the world. More recently I have begun to look at poetry as the great synthesizer, the humanizer of knowledge.” Three of his four books of poetry were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, including Horatio (1961), a long narrative poem in which Horatio fulfills Hamlet’s dying plea “to tell my story.” Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems was published in 1987.

  PONSOT, MARIE (1921–2019)

  Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ponsot graduated from St. Joseph’s College for Women there and earned an MA from Columbia University in seventeeth-century literature. After World War II she went to Paris, married, and had a daughter. Returning to the United States, she had six sons before her divorce. Remarkably she wrote much of her poetry while raising her seven children mostly on her own. She translated many children’s books from the French and was an English professor at Queens College in New York until her retirement in 1991. Her own books include The Bird Catcher (1998), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002), a New York Times “notable book of the year.”

  POULTON, KATHIAN

  Poulton teaches kindergarten in Columbus, Ohio. Her publications include education-related articles and an occasional poem or book review.

  RAINE, KATHLEEN (1908–2003)

  English poet Raine both heard and memorized poetry from her earliest childhood and was soon composing it herself. She studied the natural sciences in college, and her poems address the interface between science and spirituality. Also a scholar and critic, she published multiple works on Blake and Yeats along with sixteen books of her own poetry. Her first book of poems, Stone and Flower, came out in 1943; her last, The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine, in 2000. She won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1992.

  RANDALL, MARGARET (1936–)

  Randall is a writer, photographer, and academic. Born in New York City, she lived for many years in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and also spent time in North Vietnam. During the 1950s she was connected with both the Beats and the abstract expressionists. Because of her political and feminist views, she often came into conflict with US authorities and faced deportation in 1984. After a five-year legal battle, she won her case. She now resides with her wife, the painter Barbara Byers, in New Mexico. Her most recent poetry collection is Time’s Language: Selected Poems 1959–2018.

  RICH, ADRIENNE (1929–2012)

  Poet, essayist, and feminist, Rich was one of the leading American literary voices of the later twentieth century. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, she was encouraged by her parents to excel in her studies; she fulfilled their ambitions when she was chosen in 1950 by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. But she soon outgrew her early formalist work and moved toward a more radical approach in both style and content. She was at the forefront of the feminist, lesbian, and antiwar movements from the sixties onward. Among her many honors was a National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck. Her last collection was Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010.

  ROETHKE, THEODORE (1908–1963)

  Born in Saginaw, Michigan, Roethke spent much of his time in his father’s greenhouse, and natural themes play a large part in his poetry. In a letter to the poet Babette Deutsch he wrote that the greenhouse “is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth.” Despite problems with alcohol and bouts of manic depression, he became one of America’s leading poets and an important influence on poets of the next generation. The Waking (1953) won the Pulitzer Prize. The Far Field was his last book of poems, published posthumously in 1964.

  RUMI, JALAL AL-DIN (1207–1273)

  This thirteenth-century Persian mystic, poet, and scholar has been widely popular throughout the Middle East and Asia for seven
centuries. While the actual facts of his birthplace and travels are in question, it is believed that as a young man he fled with his family to Turkey to avoid the armies of Genghis Khan. He became a leader of a sect of dervishes, Sufi holy men. His book The Shams is considered one of the great works of Persian literature. Primarily through poet Coleman Barks’s translations, Rumi has become one of the most popular poets in the United States. Barks has written: “He wants us to be more alive, to wake up… He wants us to see our beauty, both in the mirror and in each other.”

  RYAN, KAY (1945–)

  A lifelong Californian, Kay Ryan is a true original. Her crisp, compact poems have delighted readers with their witty turns of phrase and unexpected rhymes. For many years she taught English at her local community college in Marin County. She served two terms as US Poet Laureate (from 2008 to 2010) and in 2011 was awarded both a MacArthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems.

  SNODGRASS, W. D. (1926–2009)

  Snodgrass was born in Pennsylvania, served in World War II, and then attended the University of Iowa. His first book, Heart’s Needle (1959), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Its frankly autobiographical subject matter, about losing his daughter in a divorce case, influenced other confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Snodgrass published more than thirty books of poetry, criticism, and translations, and taught at various colleges for forty years.

  STAFFORD, WILLIAM (1914–1993)

  Poet and pacifist, Stafford got a relatively late start in publishing. He was in his forties when his first book came out in 1960, but he made up for lost time when his second book, Traveling Through the Dark (1962), won a National Book Award. A native of Kansas, he was a conscientious objector in World War II and did his alternative service in forestry in the west. The quiet and peace of the wilderness and living in harmony with nature became the moral touchstones of his poetry. Stafford eventually published fifty-seven volumes of poetry, along with criticism and a book of essays, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation (1978). Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems (2013) contains many of his most popular poems.