Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent family. For one year she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now College), in nearby South Hadley, then withdrew and returned to Amherst. Her adult life was as short on external incident as it was long on imagination. Dickinson lived at her family home in Amherst form 1848 on, she rarely received visitors, and in her mature years she never went out. Suffering from agoraphobia (the fear of public places) and perhaps from an eye disorder called exotropia, she became known as the “Myth” and “the character of Amherst.” Fewer than a dozen of her poems were published in her lifetime. Such a solitary life hardly dulled her sensibilities, however, for Dickinson’s collected works-nearly two thousand poems, plus voluminous correspondence-brim with intense feeling, from terror to joy. The poems also reveal her intimate knowledge of the Bible, classical myth, and the works of Shakespeare; in addition, she admired the work of Transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson and read the Bronte’s, The Browning, Keats, and George Eliot. In an era marked by its evangelical fervor, Dickinson adopted skepticism-though she did not arrive at it easily- and her poems are remarkable for their irony, ambiguity, paradox, and sardonic wit. |She succinctly defined her aesthetic in the epigrammatic lines |Tell the Truth but tell in slant- / Success in Circuit lies,” and she once told a friend. “If I read a book (and) it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I Know that is poetry.” She wrote in the meters of hymns and made masterful use of the ballad stanza, often using slant rhyme. Although her innovations initially baffled critics, the public’s fascination with her life soon extended to her verse. She is, along with Walt Whitman, the most revered wand influential of nineteenth-century American poets. Although her poems are full of idiosyncratic spellings and structures, they are also emotionally charged. She writes on various themes such as love, death, nature, immortality and beauty.

    Amiri Baraka (1934) was born LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey. He earned a B.A. from Howard University and an M.A from Columbia University. From 1954 until 1956 he lived in the United States Air Force. Read More...

    W. H. Auden (1907-1973), British-born poet, was educated at Oxford. Deeply feeling the impact of the early thirties’ unemployment in England, he and his friends developed a social conscience which resembled communism, Look Stranger! (1936) is the collection of poems that secured his position as a leading left-wing poet. Read More...

     Cynthia Zarin (1959) was born in New York City and raised on Long Island. She was educated at Harvard College & Columbia University. A staff writer at The Now Yorker from 1985 until 1994, she currently teaches at Princeton University & lives in New York City, where she is a writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Read More...

     Cathy Song (1955) a descendant of Korean immigrants, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and raised in Wahiawa, a village on the island of Oahu. She was educated at the University of Hawaii, Wellesley College, and Boston University, and her first book, Picture Bride (1982), was published in the Yale series of Younger Poets. Read More...

     Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was born in Ilford, Essex (England), and educated at home. After working as a nurse in London during World War II, she immigrated to the United States in 1948. From 1956 to 1959 she lived in Mexico. She then taught at, among other schools, Stanford University. In addition to poetry, she published two collections of prose. Read More...

    Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). Welsh poet. Born in Swansea, he was the son of a schoolmaster. He worked for a time as a reporter for the South Wales Evening Post and established himself with the publication of Eighteen Poems in 1934, in which year he moved to London, later settling permanently back in Wales at Laugharne. Read More...

     Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father’s death in 1911 and her mother’s permanent hospitalization for mental illness in 1917, Bishop lived with relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. She was educated at Vassar College, and while there Bishop met the poet Marianne Moore, who recognized her promise and became her mentor. Read More...

    Margaret Atwood (1939) was born in Ottawa, Canada, and raised there and in Toronto. As a child, she spent much time in the woods of northern Quebec, where her father conducted entomological research. Educated at the University of Toronto, Radcliffe College and Harvard University, Atwood has taught at a number of Canadian universities and has worked as an editor for the Anansi publishing house. Read More...

    Langston Hughes (1902-67), born in Missouri is a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He led a nomadic life in the U.S. and Europe until he began his prolific literary career with The Weary Blues (1926), poems on black themes in jazz rhythms and idiom, whose success made possible his college career at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. His concern with his race, mainly in an urban setting is evident in his works, as is his social consciousness. Read More...

    Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She was educated at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. In 1953, following a month in New York City working as one of a dozen “Guest Editors” on the fashion magazine Mademoiselle, Plath suffered a bout of depression, attempted suicide, and was hospitalized for six months, these events from the gist of her novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Read More...