STEVENS, WALLACE (1879–1955)
One of America’s great modernist poets, Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. He grew up in a home filled with books and, by the time he got to Harvard College, was an active writer. Unlike most of his poet peers, however, he did not go on to teach but instead briefly practiced law, then moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and spent the rest of his working life as an insurance executive. This choice worked well for him: steady and lucrative employment allowed him sufficient time to produce a large body of outstanding poems. While he was considered a difficult poet, his combination of aesthetic and philosophical subject matter expressed in extraordinary language has appealed to a wide variety of critics and readers. Among his honors were the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1949), the National Book Award for Poetry (1951 and 1955), and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1955). The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954) and Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997) contain most of his work.
SUTPHEN, JOYCE (1949–)
Born and educated in Minnesota, Sutphen teaches British literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. She is currently serving as the state’s second Poet Laureate. She has published five books of poetry; her latest is Modern Love and Other Myths (2015).
SWENSON, MAY (1913–1989)
Born in Logan, Utah, to Swedish immigrant parents, Swenson was the eldest of ten children, all of whom spoke English as a second language. As a poet, she delighted in wordplay and was particularly interested in nature and scientific discovery. She published ten books of poetry during her lifetime and received numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987. Her Collected Poems (Library of America) came out in 2013.
SZYMBORSKA, WISLAWA (1923–2012)
A Polish poet, Szymborska was largely unknown in the West until she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Her poems are often ironic and frequently deal with political and philosophical themes. She also wrote popular essays and stories. Poems New and Collected (1998), translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, won the PEN Translation Prize.
THOMAS, DYLAN (1914–1953)
One of the great Welsh poets (but writing in English), Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales. Some of his most famous poems were published while he was still in his teens. A masterful performer of his highly rhythmic and musical works, he visited the United States in 1950 and embarked on the first of a series of wildly popular readings at colleges and art centers. However, his unpredictable behavior and drinking problem worsened, and he died prematurely at thirty-nine. His many books and recordings, in both poetry and prose, include his Collected Poems (1952) and A Child’s Christmas in Wales (1954).
TRANSTRÖMER, TOMAS (1931–2015)
Tranströmer is a world-famous Swedish poet whose work has been translated into more than fifty languages. His poems deal with spiritual and natural themes, often informed by the austere beauty of the Swedish landscape. After suffering a stroke in 1990 and losing his power of speech, he continued to write poetry and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. His Great Enigma: New Collected Poems was published in 2006.
VONNEGUT, KURT (1922–2007)
An American writer primarily of novels and short stories, Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He used his experiences as well as the beliefs and thinking of that Midwestern city in his writings. The effect of the Depression on his middle-class family produced a darkly comic voice, evident in his wildly successful novels Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Cat’s Cradle (1963). Vonnegut was an activist on a number of issues, including nuclear-arms control and protection of the earth’s biosphere. He said that he tried to be “a responsible elder in our society.”
WALCOTT, DEREK (1930–2017)
Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the Caribbean, Walcott trained as an artist but also began writing poetry while still a boy. His work alternates between English and Caribbean patois and often serves as a bridge between the two cultures. He spent many years teaching and working in theatre in the United States but always kept his link to his home in Trinidad. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and he published more than twenty books of poetry. His Collected Poems 1948–1984 came out in 1986.
WALKER, ALICE (1944–)
Novelist and poet Alice Walker, the youngest of eight children, was born in Georgia to sharecropper parents. After attending segregated schools through high school, she received a scholarship to Spelman College and later matriculated at Sarah Lawrence College. Whatever her writing medium, her work deals in large part with race and gender issues. Among her many awards are a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Award for Fiction, both in 1983, for her novel The Color Purple. Her Collected Poems was published in 2005.
WHEELOCK, JOHN HALL (1886–1978)
Wheelock was born and grew up in New York City. After college he worked at publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, eventually succeeding renowned editor Maxwell Perkins as editor in chief. He initiated the Poets of Today series and was an advocate for the poets of his time. He is quoted as saying, “The function of the arts is to… make us suddenly reexperience something that we’ve always known but haven’t been experiencing anymore.” Among his fourteen published books of poetry is This Blessed Earth: New and Selected Poems 1927–1977 (1978). His honors include the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.
WHITMAN, WALT (1819–1892)
Arguably America’s most seminal poet, Whitman has affected almost every American bard since his time. He left school at eleven and worked as a printer for five years before turning to teaching and then journalism. Whitman’s most important work, Leaves of Grass (1855), was self-published, and he continued working on it throughout his life. Ignored by most critics, the book was highly praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote directly to Whitman. During the Civil War, Whitman served as a nurse for three years in the Washington, DC, area. His final work of poetry and prose, Good-Bye My Fancy, was published in 1891.
WILBUR, RICHARD (1921–2017)
Born in New York City, Wilbur was the grandson and great-grandson of editors and wrote for the college newspaper and magazine while attending Amherst College. After serving in the army during World War II, he began to write poetry as a means of coming to terms with his wartime experiences. As a formalist writer, using traditional rhyme and meter, Wilbur was never in the vanguard, but his well-crafted poems found a wide audience. He was the second Poet Laureate of the United States and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1957 for Things of This World (1956).
WILLIAMS, C. K. (1936–2015)
A poet, translator, and critic, Williams grew up in New Jersey and started writing poetry while at the University of Pennsylvania. He was befriended by the architect Louis Kahn, who inspired him to embrace the artist’s calling. After some false starts, Williams gradually began to use what he called “long, ragged lines” for his poems, which gave them their characteristic conversational tone and, in his words, “gave me a way to deal more inclusively and exhaustively with my own mind.” He went on writing poetry until the end of his life, finishing his last book, Falling Ill, just twenty days before his death from multiple myeloma. Among his many honors were the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2000 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 2003. Selected Later Poems was published in 2015.
WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS (1883–1963)
Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, and lived there most of his life. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania medical school, he became a family doctor and practiced for more than forty years. At the same time, he carried on a successful literary career, primarily as a poet but also writing fiction, plays, essays, and translations. He was known as a modernist, but in contrast to his contemporaries T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, he preferred to use colloquial American English and write about everyday experiences and objects. His famous phrase “No ideas but in th
ings” summarized his poetic method. He won the first National Book Award for Poetry in 1950 for both the third volume of his epic poem Paterson and his Selected Poems. In 1963 he received the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962).
YEATS, W. B. (1865–1939)
William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. As a dramatist and politician, he helped spur the Irish literary revival and served as a senator for the newborn Irish Free State. However, it is as a creator of beautiful and relevant poetry that his fame ultimately rests. Born into the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had ruled Ireland for centuries, he nevertheless defined himself as staunchly Irish. While Yeats was fascinated with transcendental and occult themes in his early work, his later poems are more direct and accessible. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats was published in 1996.
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