American Authors

A B K L

Allen, James Lane King, Grace

Alcott, Louisa May Kirkland, Caroline
Apess, William Kirkland, Joseph
Austin, Mary Larcom, Lucy
Larsen, Nella
Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Sa) Lathrop, George Parsons (critic)
Bradford, William London, Jack
Bradstreet, Anne
Bryant, William Cullen M
Burton, Maria Amparo Ruiz de
Mather, Cotton
C Melville, Herman
Mena, Maria Cristina
Cabeza da Vaca, Alvar Nunez Miller, Arthur
Cable, George Washington. Morton, Thomas
Chesnutt, Charles W. Murfree, Mary Noailles (Charles Egbert Craddock)
Chopin, Kate
Clemens, Samuel L. N O
Cooke, Rose Terry
Cooper, James Fenimore Norris, Charles Gilman
Craddock, Charles Egbert (Mary Noailles Murfree) Norris, Frank
Crane, Stephen
Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. Jean de Occom, Samson
Ohiyesa(Charles Eastman)
D
P Q
Davis, Rebecca Harding
de Burton, Maria Amparo Ruiz
Deland, Margaret Perry, Thomas Sergeant (critic)
de las Casas, Bartolome Phillips, David Graham
Díaz Del Castillo, Bernal Poe, Edgar Allan
Douglass, Frederick
Dickinson, Emily
Dreiser, Theodore
Dunbar, Paul Laurence R S
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore
Ridge, John Rollin (Yellow Bird)
E Robinson, Edwin Arlington
Rowlandson, Mary
Rowson, Susanna
Eastman, Charles (Ohiyesa) Ruiz de Burton, Maria Amparo
Eaton, Edith Maude (Sui-Sin Far)
Edwards, Jonathan
Emerson, Ralph Waldo Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Equiano, Olaudah Sewall, Samuel
Evans (Wilson), Augusta Jane Simms, William Gilmore
Smith, John
Spofford, Harriet Prescott
F G Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Sui-Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton)

Far, Sui-Sin (Edith Maude Eaton) T U

Foote, Mary Hallock
Franklin, Benjamin Taylor, Edward
Frederic, Harold Thoreau, Henry David
Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins Thorpe, Thomas Bangs
Freneau, Philip Twain, Mark
Fuller, Margaret
V W X
Gale, Zona
Garland, Hamlin Warner, Charles Dudley
Glasgow, Ellen Warner, Susan
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Watanna, Onoto (Winnifred Eaton)
Grant, Robert Wharton, Edith
Wheatley, Phillis
H I Whitman, Walt
Williams, Roger
Harper, Frances E. W. Winthrop, John
Harris, Joel Chandler Woolman, John
Harte, Bret Woolson, Constance Fenimore
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Holley, Marietta Y Z
Howells, William Dean Yellow Bird (John Rollin Ridge)
Yezierska, Anzia
Irving, Washington Zitkala-Sa(Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)

Jackson, Helen Hunt

Jacobs, Harriet
James, Henry
Jewett, Sarah Orne
Johnson, James Weldon

Robert Frost
http://www.Akoot.com/robertfrost.html

Walt Whitman
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Pablo Neruda
http://www.Akoot.com/pabloneruda.html

Sylvia Plath
http://www.Akoot.com/sylviaplath.html

Edgar Allan Poe

http://www.Akoot.com/edgarallanpoe.html

Shel Silverstein
http://www.Akoot.com/shelsilverstein.html

Emily Dickinson
http://www.Akoot.com/emilydickinson.html

Anne Sexton
http://www.Akoot.com/annesexton.html

John Keats
http://www.Akoot.com/johnkeats.html

E. E. Cummings
http://www.Akoot.com/eecummings.html

Rudyard Kipling
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William Shakespeare
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Robert Louis Stevenson

http://www.Akoot.com/robertstevenson.html

Robert W. Service
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Jack Prelutsky
http://www.Akoot.com/jackprelutsky.html

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

http://www.Akoot.com/henrylongfellow.html

William Blake
http://www.Akoot.com/williamblake.html

Elizabeth Bishop
http://www.Akoot.com/elizabethbishop.html

Roald Dahl
http://www.Akoot.com/roalddahl.html
Dylan Thomas
http://www.Akoot.com/dylanthomas.html

William Carlos Williams

http://www.Akoot.com/williamcwilliams.html

Ted Kooser
http://www.Akoot.com/tedkooser.html

Mary Oliver
http://www.Akoot.com/maryoliver.html

Billy Collins
http://www.Akoot.com/billycollins.html

Adrienne Rich
http://www.Akoot.com/adriennerich.html

Donald Hall
http://www.Akoot.com/donaldhall.html

Sharon Olds
http://www.Akoot.com/sharonolds.html

W. H. Auden
http://www.Akoot.com/whauden.html

Carl Sandburg
http://www.Akoot.com/carlsandburg.html

Gary Soto
http://www.Akoot.com/garysoto.html

W. B. Yeats ~ NEW POET - 15 poems ~

http://www.Akoot.com/wbyeats.html

Robert Browning ~ NEW POET - 7 poems ~

http://www.Akoot.com/robertbrowning.html

Wallace Stevens ~ NEW POET - 13 poems ~

http://www.Akoot.com/wallacestevens.html
W. B. Yeats

Akoot - Famous Writers

o Home Brief Bio
o Poetry Board
o PoeticQ.com - Famous Writers William Butler Yeats (1865-
Gallery 1939) was born in Dublin.
o MrAfrica.TV - Live Spoken His father was a lawyer and
Word a well-known portrait
painter. Yeats was educated
in London and in Dublin, but
Picture he spent his summers in the
west of Ireland in the
family's summer house at
Connaught. The young Yeats
was very much part of the
fin de siècle in London; at
the same time he was active
in societies that attempted
an Irish literary revival. His
first volume of verse
appeared in 1887, but in his
earlier period his dramatic
production outweighed his
poetry both in bulk and in
import. Together with Lady
Gregory he founded the
Irish Theatre, which was to
become the Abbey Theatre,
and served as its chief
playwright until the
movement was joined by
John Synge. His plays
usually treat Irish legends;
they also reflect his
fascination with mysticism
and spiritualism. The
Countess Cathleen (1892),
The Land of Heart's Desire
(1894), Cathleen ni
Houlihan (1902), The King's
Threshold (1904), and
Deirdre (1907) are among
the best known.

After 1910, Yeats's dramatic

art took a sharp turn toward
a highly poetical, static, and
esoteric style. His later plays
were written for small
audiences; they experiment
with masks, dance, and
music, and were profoundly
influenced by the Japanese
Noh plays. Although a
convinced patriot, Yeats
deplored the hatred and the
bigotry of the Nationalist
movement, and his poetry is
full of moving protests
against it. He was appointed
to the Irish Senate in 1922.
Yeats is one of the few
writers whose greatest
works were written after the
award of the Nobel Prize.
Whereas he received the
Prize chiefly for his dramatic
works, his significance today
rests on his lyric
achievement. His poetry,
especially the volumes The
Wild Swans at Coole (1919),
Michael Robartes and the
Dancer (1921), The Tower
(1928), The Winding Stair
and Other Poems (1933),
and Last Poems and Plays
(1940), made him one of
the outstanding and most
influential twentieth-century
poets writing in English. His
recurrent themes are the
contrast of art and life,
masks, cyclical theories of
life (the symbol of the
winding stairs), and the
ideal of beauty and
ceremony contrasting with
the hubbub of modern life.
 This
autobiography/biography
was written at the time of
the award and first
published in the book series
Les Prix Nobel. It was later
edited and republished in
Nobel Lectures. To cite this
document, always state the
source as shown above.

William Butler Yeats died on

January 28, 1939.

Poems - 15 in all

W. B. Yeats ~New ~

Easter 1916
Adam's Curse
The Stolen Child
The Player Queen
When You are Old
Leda and the Swan
The Sorrow of Love
The Second Coming
Sailing to Byzantium
The Young Man's Song
Never give all the heart
The Heart of the Woman
The Song of Wandering
Aengus
An Irish Airman Foresees
His Death
Aedh wishes for the
Cloths of Heaven

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Robert Browning
Akoot - Famous Writers
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o MrAfrica.TV - Live Spoken Word

Picture

Brief Bio
Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell (a suburb of London),
the first child of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His mother was a fervent
Evangelical and an accomplished pianist. Mr. Browning had angered his own father
and forgone a fortune: the poet's grandfather had sent his son to oversee a West
Indies sugar plantation, but the young man had found the institution of slavery so
abhorrent that he gave up his prospects and returned home, to become a clerk in
the Bank of England. On this very modest salary he was able to marry, raise a
family, and to acquire a library of 6000 volumes. He was an exceedingly well-read
man who could recreate the seige of Troy with the household chairs and tables for
the benefit of his inquisitive son.

Indeed, most of the poet's education came at home. He was an extremely bright
child and a voracious reader (he read through all fifty volumes of the Biographie
Universelle ) and learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian by the time he was
fourteen. He attended the University of London in 1828, the first year it opened,
but left in discontent to pursue his own reading at his own pace. This somewhat
idiosyncratic but extensive education has led to difficulties for his readers: he did
not always realize how obscure were his references and allusions.

In the 1830's he met the actor William Macready and tried several times to write
verse drama for the stage. At about the same time he began to discover that his
real talents lay in taking a single character and allowing him to discover himself to
us by revealing more of himself in his speeches than he suspects-the
characteristics of the dramatic monologue. The reviews of Paracelsus (1835) had
been mostly encouraging, but the difficulty and obscurity of his long poem Sordello
(1840) turned the critics against him, and for many years they continued to
complain of obscurity even in his shorter, more accessible lyrics.

In 1845 he saw Elizabeth Barrett's Poems and contrived to meet her. Although she
was an invalid and very much under the control of a domineering father, the two
married in September 1846 and a few days later eloped to Italy, where they lived
until her death in 1861. The years in Florence were among the happiest for both of
them. Her love for him was demonstrated in the Sonnets from the Portugese, and
to her he dedicated Men and Women, which contains his best poetry. Public
sympathy for him after her death (she was a much more popular poet during their
lifetimes) surely helped the critical reception of his Collected Poems (1862) and
Dramatis Personae (1863). The Ring and the Book (1868-9), based on an "old
yellow book" which told of a Roman murder and trial, finally won him considerable
popularity. He and Tennyson were now mentioned together as the foremost poets
of the age. Although he lived and wrote actively for another twenty years, the late
'60s were the peak of his career. His influence continued to grow, however, and
finally lead to the founding of the Browning Society in 1881. He died in 1889, on
the same day that his final volume of verse, Asolando, was published. He is buried
in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Poems - 7 in all

Robert Browning ~New ~

My Star
Pippa's Song
Life in a Love
Love in a Life
Meeting at Night
My Last Duchess
Parting at Morning

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William Blake
Akoot -
Famous
Writers Brief Bio
o Home
William Blake was born on November 28, 1757 in
o Poetry
London, the third of five children. His father
Board James was a hosier, and could only afford to give
o PoeticQ.com William enough schooling to learn the basics of
- Famous reading and writing, though for a short time he
Writers was able to attend a drawing school run by Henry
Gallery Par.
o MrAfrica.TV
- Live William worked in his father's shop until his talent
Spoken for drawing became so obvious that he was
Word apprenticed to engraver James Basire at age 14.
He finished his apprenticeship at age 21, and set
out to make his living as an engraver.
Picture
Blake married Catherine Boucher at age 25, and
she worked with him on most of his artistic
creations. Together they published a book of
Blake's poems and drawings called Songs of
Innocence.

Blake engraved the words and pictures on copper

plates (a method he claimed he received in a
dream), and Catherine coloured the plates and
bound the books. Songs of Innocence sold slowly
during Blake's lifetime, indeed Blake struggled
close to poverty for much of his life.

More successful was a series of copperplate

engravings Blake did to illustrate the Book of Job
for a new edition of the Old Testament.

Blake did not have a head for business, and he

turned down publisher's requests to focus on his
own subjects. In his choice of subject Blake was
often guided by his gentle, mystical views of
Christianity. Songs of Experience (1794) was
followed by Milton (1804-1808), and Jerusalem
(1804-1820).

In 1800 Blake gained a patron in William Hayley,

who commissioned him to illustrate his Life of
Cowper, and to create busts of famous poets for
his house in Felpham, Suurey.

While at Felpham, Blake was involved in a bizarre

episode which could have proven disastrous; he
 was accused by a drunken soldier of cursing the
king, and on this testimony he was brought to
trial for treason. The case against Blake proved
flimsy, and he was cleared of the charges.

Blake poured his whole being into his work. The

lack of public recognition sent him into a severe
depression which lasted from 1810-1817, and
even his close friends thought him insane.

Unlike painters like Gainsborough, Blake worked

on a small scale; most of his engravings are little
more than inches in height, yet the detailed
rendering is superb and exact. Blake's work
received far more public acclaim after his death,
and an excerpt from his poem Milton was set to
music, becoming a sort of unofficial Christian
anthem of English nationalism in the 20th
century.

William Blake died on August 12, 1827, and is

buried in an unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields,
London.

Poems - 10 in all

William Blake ~New ~

London
THE LILY
The Tyger
Infant Joy
A Poison Tree
NURSE'S SONG
The Divine Image
THE ECHOING GREEN
The Chimney-Sweeper
From Milton: And did those feet

John Keats
Akoot - Famous Writers
o Home Brief Bio
o Poetry Board
o PoeticQ.com - Famous John Keats was born on 31 October
Writers Gallery 1795 (probably), first child of Thomas
o MrAfrica.TV - Live Keats and Frances Jennings Keats, who
Spoken Word had apparently eloped. Everything was
pretty ordinary for all concerned for a
while--the Keatses had three more
Picture sons (George and Thomas, plus
Edward who died as a baby) and one
daughter, Frances, by 1803. That was
also the year when John went away to
school at Enfield. In 1804, John's
father was killed in a fall from a horse.
Just over two months later, for
mysterious reasons, Frances
remarried, to a London bank clerk
named William Rawlings. Frances
quickly decided she'd made some sort
of terrible error and left, taking
nothing with her since the laws of the
time decreed that all her property and
even her children belonged to her
husband. Frances' mother, Alice, swept
in and took custody of the children, but
she could do nothing about the Swan
and Hoop, which Rawlings sold
immediately before disappearing. It
was around this time that John became
prone to fistfights, which he rarely lost
even though he was small for his age.

Frances reappeared suddenly in 1809,

ill and depressed from many years of
depending on the kindness of
strangers. John was overjoyed to see
her and took care of her devotedly, but
it was soon obvious that she had
consumption. She died in 1810, a year
or so after her brother died of the
same disease. John was crushed, and
turned from fighting to studying. A
year later, one of his financial
guardians, a man named Abbey, sat
him down and asked John what he'd
like to do for a living. John had already
considered the question, and replied
that he'd like to be a surgeon. So he
was duly apprenticed to a surgeon
named Hammond who lived in the
neighborhood.

It was in 1813 that John first started

reading lyric poetry, most notably
works by Sir Edmund Spenser like
"The Faerie Queen." It was also around
this time that John began to really
rebel against Hammond. The following
year, Grandmother Jennings died, and
the family was split up, it being
improper at that time for younger
sisters to live with older brothers
without a parental type around.
Frances was sent to live with the kids'
other financial guardian and the two
boys went to work. John just kept to
himself and wrote really sad poems.
These poems still weren't very good,
and he kept right on with learning to
be a surgeon (in fact, he was doing so
well, he'd jumped ahead of the
curriculum) but over the next couple of
years, poetry gradually became the
overriding ambition of his life and
medicine was left in the dust.

One of John's sonnets, called "To

Solitude, " was printed in 1816, in the
liberal newspaper, The Examiner. This
sonnet was good, but it wasn't until a
little later in the year that he wrote
"On First Looking Into Chapman's
Homer," which proved that he was the
man to watch. His first volume of
poetry appeared on 3 March 1817, and
it didn't sell very well at all. John was
depressed, but kept writing. Shelley
had challenged him to an epic poetry
writing contest over the summer, and
for that contest, John wroteEndymion,
though he didn't finish it within the
time limit, so I guess Shelley won. But
John was the sought-after young poet
in London, and he lived in a whirl of
parties and dances, even though he
didn't much like crowds.

In June of 1818, John apparently

became convinced that he would have
only three more years to live. He'd
already written many of his most
famous poems, but he was still
convinced that he hadn't yet done
enough to leave his mark on the
literary world. His brother George had
announced plans to emigrate to Illinois
with his new wife, and his brother Tom
had just started showing signs of
consumption and needed John to look
after him. And to top it all off, John
had just fallen madly in love with a
young woman named Frances Brawne.
All of this overwhelmed and depressed
him. He tried to lose himself in his
latest poem, Hyperion, but that's hard
to do when you're spending most of
your time in a sickroom.

Tom died in December of 1818.

Though John should have received
£500 from Tom's estate, Abbey (the
guardian) decreed that he couldn't
have it until his sister Frances turned
21. It wasn't until a year or so after
John's death that anyone realized that
Abbey had misappropriated nearly
£1000 from Alice Jennings' estate. To
make matters worse, brother George
had gone broke and was begging John
to send him whatever he could
scavenge from the family funds.
Desparate, John convinced his
publishers to issue another volume of
his poetry, but this was not a stunning
success. Dead broke, he still allowed
George to have the remnants of the
family estate. John was rapidly
becoming dependant on the help of his
friends, people like Leigh Hunt (who'd
gotten married and settled down
some) and Charles Brown. John was
also developing consumption, coughing
up blood in February of 1820.

It was around this time that, without

consulting John, Charles began
arrangements for sending John to
Italy. John didn't want to be so far
away from his ladylove, but he felt
incapable of arguing. He left in
September of1820, accompanied by
Joseph Severn, an up and coming
portrait artist. Once in Rome, the two
men moved into lodgings across the
piazza from an English doctor named
Clark. John was not allowed to write
poetry and only given the dullest
books to read, as emotional
excitement was considered very bad
for consumptive patients. John was
definitely in a state; he stopped
opening letters, even from his beloved
Frances, after a month or so. In
December, he tried to commit suicide
by taking laudanum, but Severn
stopped him. Later, delirious from the
disease and the starvation diet Clark
prescribed, John would rant at Severn
for stopping him and even went so far
as to accuse his friends of having
poisoned him back in London.

On 23 February 1821, John died.

Frances, upon hearing the news,
seemed all right for a few weeks, then
fell ill, and after recovering began
wearing widows' weeds. John had
requested that his tomstone read only
"Here lies one whose name was writ in
water." Charles Brown, feeling that
was too brusque, had this carved on
the stone instead: "This Grave
contains all that was Mortal of a
YOUNG ENGLISH POET Who on his
Death Bed, in the Malicious Power of
his Enemies, Desired these Words to
be engraven on his Tomb Stone 'Here
lies One Whose Name was writ in
Water'".

Poems - 10 in all

John Keats

Fancy
Asleep
 To Sleep
To Homer
Imitation of Spenser
In drear-nighted December
Lines on the Mermaid Tavern
To One who has been Long in City
Pent
When I have Fears that I may
Cease to Be
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear
Once Again

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Edgar Allan Poe

Akoot - Famous
Writers
Brief Bio
o Home
o Poetry Board
The South's most renowned literary artist of
o PoeticQ.com - the 19th century spent most of his productive
Famous Writers years as a struggling journalist in large
Gallery northern cities. Born on 19 January 1809, in
o MrAfrica.TV - Boston, Mass., Poe was the second child of
Live Spoken David and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both active
Word theatrical performers on the East Coast of the
United States. His father mysteriously
disappeared in 1810, and after his mother's
Picture subsequent death, in December 1811, he
became the foster son of John Allan, a
prominent Richmond, Va., tobacco merchant
who gave Poe many childhood advantages. In
1826 he attended the University of Virginia,
leaving after only a few months to join the
United States Army. His first volume of
poems, entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems,
was privately published in 1827; a second
volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor
Poems, appeared in 1829 shortly after he was
honorably discharged from the army. Aided
by his foster father, he entered West Point in
1830 as a cadet but was soon discharged for
failing to heed regulations. Beginning in 1829,
influential writers and journalists like John
Neal and John P. Kennedy began to support
his efforts to attain literary prominence.
Poems,, a third volume of poetry, was
published in 1831.

Thoroughly trained in the classics and in the

rhetoric and aesthetics of the Scottish
common-sense school of philosophers, Poe
was, according to the critic Robert D. Jacobs,
indeed a southerner by temperament and
inclination. Many of his formative years were
spent in the southern cities of Richmond and
Baltimore, the latter being the home of his
blood relatives. Choosing a literary career
after the death of his foster father, Poe began
to contribute critical reviews to the Richmond
Southern Literary Messenger in 1835 and
later became its editor for two years. He
married Virginia Clemm, his cousin who was
less than 14 years old, in 1836. Until his
death in 1849, Poe worked tirelessly as an
editor and a reviewer, composing at the same
time poetry, fiction, reviews, and essays of
the highest literary excellence. He contributed
to several noted American periodicals and
newspapers; and in October 1845 he edited
and briefly owned his own magazine,
Broadway Journal.

Poe published his only major long piece, The

Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, in 1838 and a
short story collection, Tales of the Grotesque
and Arabesque, in 1839. His poem "The
Raven," printed in the New York Evening
Mirror on 29 January 1845, brought him
considerable recognition. Tales, a second
collection of short stories, and a third volume
of poems, The Raven and Other Poems,
appeared in 1845. After the death of his wife
in January 1847, he continued to write and to
pursue his ambition of owning his own
magazine. In early October of 1849, while
traveling to New York to marry Sarah Royster
Shelton, a widowed former sweetheart, Poe
stopped in Baltimore, where he was later
found ill on a city street. He died in a
Baltimore hospital on 7 October 1849. His
unexpected death was noted by nearly every
significant newspaper and magazine in the
eastern United States.

A controversial figure, Poe has been the

subject of much speculative analysis.
Generally, his biographers conclude that his
instability as a person was in part due to the
pressure of being a journalist. Although
periodically he experienced poverty and the ill
effects of poor health, Poe managed to
perfect a variety of literary forms. He
absorbed the current wave of romantic
thought, which in his day brought significant
changes in literary theory and practice. His
classical bent, along with his background in
Scottish philosophy and aesthetics,
contributed to his theory of unity of effect and
to his ideas about the short poem. He and
Nathaniel Hawthorne introduced the
ambiguities of symbolism in their Gothic
tales, and Poe is credited with defining the
short story as a distinct literary form. His
attempts to formulate an objective method
for writing poetry had some impact upon the
French Symbolist poets of the later decades
of the 19th century. In the area of popular
literature, he is said to have fathered the
modern detective story and some forms of
science fiction.

Poe believed his art - all art - should be

evaluated by international, rather than
national or regional, standards, but he was,
nonetheless, frequently identified at the time
with the South. He did not defend his region's
politics or social customs, like other
antebellum southern writers, but his lyricism
was common to southern poets. Raised a
Virginian, Poe sometimes posed as the
southern gentleman, even if transcending
regionalism in his work.
 Poems - 10 in all

Edgar Allan Poe

Song
A Dream
A Valentine
Spirits Of The Dead
A Dream Within A Dream

Edgar Allan Poe - 2

Alone
Hymn
Dreams
Serenade
Fairy-Land

Sylvia Plath
Akoot - Famous
Writers
Brief Bio
o Home
o Poetry Board
Born to middle class parents in Jamaica
o PoeticQ.com - Plain, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath published
Famous Writers her first poem when she was eight.
Gallery Sensitive, intelligent, compelled toward
o MrAfrica.TV - perfection in everything she attempted, she
Live Spoken was, on the surface, a model daughter,
Word popular in school, earning straight A's,
winning the best prizes. By the time she
entered Smith College on a scholarship in
Picture 1950 she already had an impressive list of
publications, and while at Smith she wrote
over four hundred poems.

Sylvia's surface perfection was however

underlain by grave personal discontinuities,
some of which doubtless had their origin in
the death of her father (he was a college
professor and an expert on bees) when she
was eight. During the summer following her
junior year at Smith, having returned from a
stay in New York City where she had been a
student ``guest editor'' at Mademoiselle
Magazine, Sylvia nearly succeeded in killing
herself by swallowing sleeping pills. She
later described this experience in an
autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar,
published in 1963. After a period of recovery
involving electroshock and psychotherapy
Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and
literary success, graduating from Smith
summa cum laude in 1955 and winning a
Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge,
England.

In 1956 she married the English poet Ted

Hughes , and in 1960, when she was 28, her
first book, The Colossus, was published in
England. The poems in this book---formally
precise, well wrought---show clearly the
dedication with which Sylvia had served her
apprenticeship; yet they give only glimpses
of what was to come in the poems she
would begin writing early in 1961. She and
Ted Hughes settled for a while in an English
country village in Devon, but less than two
years after the birth of their first child the
marriage broke apart.

The winter of 1962-63, one of the coldest in

centuries, found Sylvia living in a small
London flat, now with two children, ill with
flu and low on money. The hardness of her
life seemed to increase her need to write,
and she often worked between four and
eight in the morning, before the children
woke, sometimes finishing a poem a day. In
these last poems it is as if some deeper,
powerful self has grabbed control; death is
given a cruel physical allure and psychic pain
becomes almost tactile.

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed

herself with cooking gas at the age of 30.
Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of
her last poems, was published; this was
followed by Crossing the Water and Winter
Trees in 1971, and, in 1981, The Collected
 Poems appeared, edited by Ted Hughes.

Poems - 15 in all

Sylvia Plath

Owl
Jilted
Rhyme
Kindness
Aftermath
Admonitions
Apprehensions
An Appearance
Among the Narcissi
A Better Resurrection

Sylvia Plath - 3

Edge
Balloons
Firesong
Bluebeard
Childless Woman

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Robert Frost
Akoot - Famous Writers
o Home Brief Bio
o Poetry Board
o PoeticQ.com - Famous Robert Lee Frost, b. San
Writers Gallery Francisco, Mar. 26, 1874, d.
o MrAfrica.TV - Live Spoken Boston, Jan. 29, 1963, was one of
 Word
America's leading 20th-century
Picture poets and a four-time winner of
the Pulitzer Prize. An essentially
pastoral poet often associated
with rural New England, Frost
wrote poems whose philosophical
dimensions transcend any region.
Although his verse forms are
traditional--he often said, in a dig
at archrival Carl Sandburg, that
he would as soon play tennis
without a net as write free
verse--he was a pioneer in the
interplay of rhythm and meter
and in the poetic use of the
vocabulary and inflections of
everyday speech. His poetry is
thus both traditional and
experimental, regional and
universal.

After his father's death in 1885,

when young Frost was 11, the
family left California and settled
in Massachusetts. Frost attended
high school in that state, entered
Dartmouth College, but remained
less than one semester.
Returning to Massachusetts, he
taughtschool and worked in a mill
and as a newspaper reporter. In
1894 he sold "My Butterfly: An
Elegy" to The Independent, a New
York literary journal. A year later
he married Elinor White, with
whom he had shared
valedictorian honors at Lawrence
(Mass.) High School. From 1897
to 1899 he attended Harvard
College as a special student but
left without a degree. Over the
next ten years he wrote (but
rarely published) poems,
operated a farm in Derry, New
Hampshire (purchased for him by
his paternal grandfather), and
supplemented his income by
teaching at Derry's Pinkerton
Academy.

In 1912, at the age of 38, he sold

the farm and used the proceeds
to take his family to England,
where he could devote himself
entirely to writing. His efforts to
establish himself and his work
were almost immediately
successful. A Boy's Will was
accepted by a London publisher
and brought out in 1913, followed
a year later by North of Boston.
Favorable reviews on both sides
of the Atlantic resulted in
American publication of the books
by Henry Holt and Company,
Frost's primary American
publisher, and in the establishing
of Frost's transatlantic reputation.

As part of his determined efforts

on his own behalf, Frost had
called on several prominent
literary figures soon after his
arrival in England. One of these
was Ezra POUND, who wrote the
first American review of Frost's
verse for Harriet Munroe's Poetry
magazine. (Though he disliked
Pound, Frost was later
instrumental in obtaining Pound's
release from long confinement in
a Washington, D.C., mental
hospital.) Frost was more
favorably impressed and more
lastingly influenced by the so-
called Georgian poets Lascelles
Abercrombie, Rupert BROOKE,
and T. E. Hulme, whose rural
subjects and style were more in
keeping with his own. While living
near the Georgians in
Gloucestershire, Frost became
especially close to a brooding
Welshman named Edward
Thomas, whom he urged to turn
from prose to poetry. Thomas did
so, dedicating his first and only
volume of verse to Frost before
his death in World War I.

The Frosts sailed for the United

States in February 1915 and
landed in New York City two days
after the U.S. publication of North
of Boston (the first of his books to
be published in America). Sales of
that book and of A Boy's Will
enabled Frost to buy a farm in
Franconia, N.H.; to place new
poems in literary periodicals and
publish a third book, Mountain
Interval (1916); and to embark
on a long career of writing,
teaching, and lecturing. In 1924
he received a Pulitzer Prize in
poetry for New Hampshire
(1923). He was lauded again for
Collected Poems (1930), A
Further Range (1936), and A
Witness Tree (1942). Over the
years he received an
unprecedented number and range
of literary, academic, and public
honors.

Frost's importance as a poet

derives from the power and
memorability of particular poems.
"The Death of the Hired Man"
(from North of Boston) combines
lyric and dramatic poetry in blank
verse. "After Apple-Picking" (from
the same volume) is a free-verse
dream poem with philosophical
undertones. "Mending Wall" (also
published in North of Boston)
demonstrates Frost's
simultaneous command of lyrical
verse, dramatic conversation, and
ironic commentary. "The Road
Not Taken" and "Birches" (from
Mountain Interval) and the oft-
studied "Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening" (from New
Hampshire) exemplify Frost's
ability to join the pastoral and
philosophical modes in lyrics of
unforgettable beauty.

Frost's poetic and political

conservatism caused him to lose
favor with some literary critics,
but his reputation as a major poet
is secure. He unquestionably
succeeded in realizing his life's
ambition: to write "a few poems it
will be hard to get rid of."

Poems - 20 in all

Robert Frost

Stars
Riders
October
MOWING
Plowmen
Revelation
The Cocoon
A Late Walk
A Minor Bird
Into My Own
A Dream Pang
DUST OF SNOW
A Cliff Dwelling
A Line-Storm Song
My November Guest

Robert Frost - 3

Bereft
Hannibal
Devotion
The Thatch
Immigrants

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